How much aid are they getting for this?
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...d/4911935.html
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea is showing that it is ready to shut down its nuclear reactor, the top U.S. negotiator said Friday, adding to optimism that the communist government is intent on fulfilling its disarmament pledge.
The two-day trip by Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill to North Korea — his first to the country — came after the stalled disarmament process began moving again once a banking dispute between the United States and North Korea was resolved. The North invited U.N. nuclear inspectors over the weekend in a first step toward meeting its obligations under an international accord reached in February.
The deal calls for North Korea to shut its reactor in Yongbyon that produces plutonium, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons, toward its eventual dismantlement, in exchange for economic aid and political concessions. North Korea had ignored an April deadline to close the reactor.
"I come away from this two-day set of meetings buoyed by a sense that we are going to be able to achieve our full objectives, that is complete denuclearization," Hill said in Seoul. He said the North Koreans "indicated that they are prepared promptly to shut down the Yongbyon facility as called for in the February agreement."
No new deadline was set for North Korea to close the reactor, and Hill told CNN that disabling it "where you break it and it can't be brought back on line — that's a few months down the road."
He also told CNN that North Korea has about 110 pounds of reprocessed plutonium, which he said the country must give up.
"But frankly, that's going to be at a later stage," he said. "What we're trying to do now is make sure that 110-pound problem doesn't become a 220-pound problem, that is, we'd like to get this reactor shut down, so we don't have more plutonium to deal with."
Hill said talks with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye Gwan and Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun "were very detailed, very substantive, and I believe they were also very useful and positive."
Hill also said that he and the North Korean officials expressed their support for holding an early meeting of chief delegates to the six-way talks, as well as a meeting of foreign ministers.
China, Japan, South Korea and Russia round out the forum, which was set up in 2003 to try to end North Korea's nuclear programs.
Hill added, however, that he realized it would take "a great deal of time, a great deal of effort, a lot of work" in ridding North Korea of its nuclear programs, including weapons.
At the North's invitation, officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency plan to visit the capital of Pyongyang next week to talk about the reactor shutdown.
The financial dispute centered on $25 million of North Korean funds frozen in a Macau bank blacklisted by Washington over allegations of money-laundering and other financial crimes.
North Korea, demanding the release of the money, had boycotted the nuclear talks for more than a year while conducting its first nuclear test in October 2006.
Washington helped unblock the North's funds earlier this year to move the disarmament talks forward. But their transfer to a North Korean account has been delayed due to technical and legal problems involved.
A Russian official said Friday that technical difficulties had caused a delay.
"The money transfer is to be conducted today," Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. Officials have said the money was to be sent to a North Korean account at a Russian bank.
The visit by Hill, coming before North Korea fulfills its promises, appeared to demonstrate how much the U.S. wants a breakthrough in efforts to dismantle the atomic weapons program.
The Bush administration has in the past preferred to meet the North with regional powers like China and Japan at the talks.
But the U.S. has been moving away from that limitation, holding meetings on the sidelines of summits and sending White House adviser Victor Cha to Pyongyang earlier this year. Hill's trip is the clearest indication yet of a more direct approach.
The U.S. and North Korea have been at odds since the 1950-53 Korean War and do not have formal diplomatic relations.
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Associated Press writers Bo-Mi Lim in Seoul and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.
