New York – The United States and its partners on Tuesday dealt the death blow to a project to build two light-water atomic reactors for North Korea to entice it into dismantling its nuclear weapons program, officials said.
The decade-old light-water reactor project had been mothballed for the past two years, kept barely alive in case North Korea showed signs of resuming International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and liquidating its ambitious self-proclaimed nuclear weapons program.
The New York-based Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, also known as KEDO, did not issue a formal statement at the end of a two-day session of executive board meetings Tuesday.
But the U.S. delegate, Ambassador Joseph DiTrani, said after the meeting that the board members – the United States, South Korea, Japan and European Union – had agreed on the “termination” of the light-water reactor project, KEDO spokesman Brian Kremer confirmed.
The decision comes at a particularly delicate moment in the fitful series of six-nation talks aimed at disarming North Korea.
The fifth round of talks among the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan ended Nov. 11 without signs of major progress.
At the end of the fourth round of six-way talks in September, North Korea pledged in principle to disarm but maintained that it would need light-water reactors to provide electricity beforehand.
