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 You are in: Under Secretary for Political Affairs > Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs > Releases > Remarks > 2007 East Asian and Pacific Affairs Remarks, Testimony, and Speeches 

Comments to Reporters About North Korea Upon Arrival at Okura Hotel

Christopher R. Hill, Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Okura Hotel
Tokyo, Japan
September 25, 2007

QUESTION: (Inaudible) Kim Gye-gwan in Beijing, where he says that the talks regarding highly enriched uranium are not really urgent. Do you agree with that?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don’t know. I haven’t seen his comments. But the DPRK has agreed that this issue must be resolved to mutual satisfaction. So I’m sure we’ll be continuing our discussions on that.

QUESTION: What will be really highly urgent in this round?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Well, what is very urgent in this round is to have a Six-Party agreement on how to disable facilities and how to provide the declaration. So we need to do that. We need to agree on a timeframe, which I hope will be the end of the year, and agree on fuel oil. We’ve done a lot of work in the working groups. And this is an opportunity to bring all those activities together and try to get a new sort of February-style agreement like the one we reached in February and then go ahead with this round.

QUESTION: About the disablement of nuclear facilities, to what degree are you thinking about, like, power types --

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: We had a team that went there. The three nuclear-weapons states in the Six-Party process went two or three weeks ago. So I think what’s important is they need to make a report to the Six-Party meeting, and then we’ll decide what needs to be done.

QUESTION: I heard that you’re trying to disable them so they won’t be able to restart them in, like, one year?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Yes, something like that. Of course, within this next year we plan to take the next steps and try to go to complete denuclearization, which means abandoning their fissile material. But I think it would be very good if we can have a disabling where they cannot restart them even if they wanted to -- that it would take more than a year. So we’re working on that.



Released on September 25, 2007

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