N.Korean uranium enrichment program fades as issue

[struggle4progress]

Sat 10 Feb 2007 18:18:23 GMT

By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (Reuters) - More than four years after the United States accused North Korea of a covert uranium enrichment program -- triggering collapse of a nuclear deal with Pyongyang -- the program has receded as an issue and some experts say Washington may have overstated or misread the intelligence.

U.S. officials no longer make a major public issue of the enrichment program, which the CIA once predicted might produce nuclear fuel by 2005 but apparently has not.

They say it will be taken care of in the later stages of six-country negotiations aimed at ending the North's nuclear ambitions, not in this weekend's talks in Beijing.

Yet "everything" about the last four years of the nuclear crisis -- North Korea's accelerated production of plutonium, its first test of a nuclear device in October 2006, its withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a 1994 deal with Washington -- "is linked to that HEU (highly enriched uranium) claim," said Charles Pritchard, a former U.S. negotiator with North Korea ...

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=N09302593&WTmodLoc=World-R5-Alertnet-6

Worth reading, especially given the noise surrounding Iraq's enrichment