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For North Korea, Iran-style nuke deal not an option

PYONGYANG — If any hopes have been raised that the progress between the United States and Iran to halt Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons could bring about change in Pyongyang, North Korea has gone out of its way to thwart them.

North Korean soldiers (centre in background) looking across the border into South Korea as UN Command soldiers pose for a photo after a ceremony to commemorate the 62nd anniversary of the Korean War, at the border village of Panmunjom in South Korea on Monday. Pyongyang has gone out of its way to thwart hopes that it might be open to a nuclear deal similar to Iran’s. Photo: AP

North Korean soldiers (centre in background) looking across the border into South Korea as UN Command soldiers pose for a photo after a ceremony to commemorate the 62nd anniversary of the Korean War, at the border village of Panmunjom in South Korea on Monday. Pyongyang has gone out of its way to thwart hopes that it might be open to a nuclear deal similar to Iran’s. Photo: AP

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PYONGYANG — If any hopes have been raised that the progress between the United States and Iran to halt Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons could bring about change in Pyongyang, North Korea has gone out of its way to thwart them.

In a flurry of public comments since the deal, the North has been blunt: Its nuclear weapons are not a bargaining chip; it is already a member of the nuclear club; and if Washington wants to talk, it must recognise the North as such or put an immediate end to its hostile policies towards Pyongyang.

Clearly, the differences between North Korea and Iran are vast.

Pyongyang has already gone down the negotiations road and come out on the other end with a small, but potentially threatening nuclear arsenal. It is also still technically at war with Washington and has a powerful rival and US ally, South Korea, along with tens of thousands of American troops, right across the Demilitarized Zone.

The biggest issue of all, however, could simply be that it is not in the DNA of North Korea’s leaders to flip-flop.

Pyongyang’s desire for nuclear defence against the far superior US forces probably goes all the way back to the country’s founder and first president, Kim Il Sung. For its current leader, Mr Kim Jong Un, the elder Kim’s grandson, reversing that course would be an unprecedentedly bold break with the past and would bring into question the portrayal of the ruling Kim dynasty as infallible.

Mr Kim Jong Un told veterans gathered last week in Pyongyang for the 62nd anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War that peace had yet to come to the Korean Peninsula. He held fast to the North’s constant warnings to its people that they must be ready for another, final showdown with the US.

He also said the North’s possession of nuclear weapons has dramatically shifted the balance of power.

“Our force, at present, is not what it was in the 1950s, when we had to fight with rifles in our hands against the US imperialists armed to the teeth,” he said in the address, which was repeatedly broadcast on television and carried in full in the North’s state-run newspapers.

“We now possess such a force as to fight any form of warfare of the choice of the United States. We have a might powerful enough to deter the United States from unleashing a nuclear war.”

North Korea watchers stress that such rhetoric needs to be taken with a big grain of salt. Whipping up domestic fears of an imminent US threat is politically useful in North Korea and helps rally the nation behind its leaders, while distracting attention from the country’s many economic problems, and lack of social freedoms and individual rights.

But there are also signs that the North could be planning to demonstrate its defiance of US pressure in the months ahead, by launching a rocket in conjunction with large-scale celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the founding of its ruling party on Oct 10.

For the US, North Korea itself is the cautionary tale. Decades of talks and agreements with the North failed spectacularly, and critics worry that Iran could try to play the same game.

The Iran deal is opposed by most lawmakers in the Republican-held Congress, with some drawing a direct comparison to the North Korea negotiations, starting with the Agreed Framework agreement reached in 1994 under then-President Bill Clinton. Under that deal, Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme was frozen in return for the provision of nuclear power reactors and the eventual normalisation of ties with the US. The deal subsequently unravelled.

Washington has been careful to point out the differences.

“This is a very different agreement from anything that ever existed with North Korea,’’ Secretary of State John Kerry told a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing on the Iran deal on Tuesday.

Mr Kerry said the Iran deal covers all possible nuclear-related activities, whereas the 1994 agreement with North Korea covered only its plutonium programme. He also said that Iran had given consent to a process of inspections of its nuclear facilities — a highly problematic issue in the dealings with Pyongyang.

At about the same time, North Korea’s ambassadors to the United Nations and Beijing held news conferences posing their counterargument — that it is the US impeding the dialogue process.

Ambassador Jang Il Hun told reporters at the UN that no offers for talks had been made since one offered by himself in January. “We see no prospect of resuming the ongoing effort to ease tension between the two countries,” he concluded. AP

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