Agence France-Presse,
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Sunday for full transparency from North Korea over its nuclear weapons program amid reports it was secretly aiding Syria develop an atomic weapons facility.
“There are frankly a lot of questions that remain to be answered and we want to be able to answer questions about all aspects of the North Korean nuclear program,” she told reporters with her Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi beside her, before their talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
“So that's very important,” she said as preparations got underway for a crucial round of talks among the United State, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas beginning Thursday in Beijing aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
The chief US diplomat and Yang discussed issues linked to the six-party talks, a State Department official said.
Rice did not cite the reported North Korean-Syrian links. If true, they could cast a dark cloud over US policy towards North Korea, which US President George W. Bush, weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, has hailed as a success.
US and British newspapers have reported that North Korea was secretly helping Syria to develop a nuclear weapons facility.
Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that elite Israeli forces seized North Korean nuclear material during a raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israeli warplanes bombed it September 6.
Quoting well-placed sources, it said Sunday that the commandos seized the material from a compound near Dayr az-Zwar in northern Syria and added that tests of it in Israel showed it was of North Korean origin.
Sean McCormack, spokesman for the US State Department, declined to comment on the Sunday Times report but said Washington was “very concerned about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction around the globe.
“We don't want to see the world's worst weapons get into the world's worst hands,” he told the local Fox television network.
“So, we are definitely on this case,” he said.
Reports in the New York Times and Washington Post also made similar links between North Korea and Syria based on intelligence information supposedly from Israel.
North Korea has denied the claims and insists it is keeping an earlier pledge not to allow the transfer of nuclear materials.
Despite the apparent nuclear proliferation concerns, Rice noted progress in the six-party talks based on a February 13 agreement under which North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program in return for energy aid and diplomatic and security guarantees.
In July, North Korea shut down a key nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in return for 50,000 tons of fuel oil under the first phase of the agreement's implementation.
Experts from nuclear weapon states the United States, China and Russia visited the Yongbyon complex in preparation for the meeting this week, at which representatives are expected to work on setting a firm deadline for the permanent disabling of the North's nuclear facilities.
Rice said Pyongyang had provided “very good access” to the experts.
US top nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill had said that participants in the six-party talks would seek to devise and adopt a “work plan” for Pyongyang to declare and disable its entire nuclear arsenal.
Negotiators are also expected to set a date for the first meeting of foreign ministers from the six nations involved in the nuclear talks, which was given new urgency when North Korea tested a nuclear device last year.
Yang said he and Rice “need to work very hard” on various agreements reached between Bush and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao at their last meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum summit recently in Sydney. He did not say which issues they had reached consensus on.
Rice and Yang also discussed Iran and climate change, among other topics.
Yang said “there is good cooperation between China and the United States on many issues” and that “the relationship is going in the right direction on the whole.”
