South Korea Conducts Live-Fire Drills
The New York Times reports:
PYONGYANG, North Korea — South Korea began live-fire artillery exercises on Monday, escalating a confrontation with North Korea even as an American official reported “important progress” in breaking through the North’s isolation in talks here in the North Korean capital.
The South has insisted on its right to go through with the drills in disputed waters around the Yeonpyeong Island, despite threats from the North for massive military retaliation.
But a few hours earlier, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations, said the North had agreed to concessions related to its nuclear program, a main source of tension on the peninsula. Mr. Richardson was on an unofficial trip approved by the State Department, meeting here with high ranking military officials, the North Korean vice president and members of the Foreign Ministry over five days.
Mr. Richardson said the North had made two significant concessions toward reopening six-party talks on the country’s nuclear program. He said it had agreed to allow United Nations nuclear inspectors back into the Yongbyon nuclear complex to insure that it is not producing enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. The North recently showed a Western nuclear expert a new and stunningly sophisticated facility there; it had expelled inspectors last year.
The other concession was a willingness to sell 12,000 plutonium fuel rods to South Korea, removing bomb-making material from the North.
“I would describe this as important progress,” Mr. Richardson said.
However a spokesman for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said the concessions had no bearing on the South’s drills.
