VIENNA, Austria — The U.S. has agreed to share documents on North Korea’s secretive nuclear program with the U.N. nuclear monitor and is ready to enlist China as the middleman in the delicate process, diplomats have told The Associated Press.
At issue are 18,500 pages of documentation provided by Pyongyang this month. Washington plans to scrutinize the technical logs from the North’s Yongbyon reactor to see if North Korea is telling the truth about a bomb program it has agreed to trade away for economic and political rewards.
The U.S. probe of the North Korean records is to focus on the amount of plutonium that the North has produced from spent fuel from Yongbyon.
Two diplomats, speaking separately to the AP recently, said that Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill agreed to the plan with Chinese officials and Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in the past two weeks. Hill is Washington’s top North Korea nuclear negotiator.
