North Korea Bars U.S. Oil Inspectors

In another blow to a 1994 nuclear deal with the United States, North Korea has barred a U.S.-led consortium from inspecting how the communist country is using deliveries of fuel oil, a South Korean official said Friday.

The move followed a decision last week by the United States and its allies to suspend oil deliveries to the North beginning in December to punish it for a secret nuclear weapons program that violates the 1994 deal.

The last shipment of oil arrived in the North earlier this week on a tanker from Singapore. But North Korea denied access to half a dozen inspectors whose job is to monitor where the oil goes, a South Korean Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

The oil is meant to fuel power plants to alleviate North Korea's desperate energy shortages, and there is concern that it could be diverted to the communist country's massive military.

Japan's Kyodo News said the U.S.-led consortium, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, had planned to send inspectors to North Korea next week. It cited an unidentified KEDO official.

On Thursday, North Korea said the 1994 Agreed Framework had collapsed, and said the United States was at fault because it suspended the oil deliveries.

South Korean President Kim Dae-jung urged Washington and Pyongyang to seek a compromise to keep the divided peninsula free of conflict.

"The two sides should cooperate," Kim's office quoted him as saying. "North Korea must give up its nuclear weapons program and when that happens, the United States should guarantee the North's right to exist."

The Agreed Framework required North Korea to freeze a suspected nuclear weapons program using plutonium in return for two modern reactors and 500,000 tons of heavy oil annually until those reactors are built.

In October, visiting U.S. officials said North Korea told them that it had a new weapons program using enriched uranium. North Korea had repeatedly threatened to abandon the Agreed Framework, complaining about delays in the construction of the reactors.

In Tokyo, South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun said Friday that he did not consider North Korea's latest statement to be a sign that it has withdrawn from the nuclear pact.

"Neither the United States nor North Korea said they were withdrawing from the Agreed Framework," Jeong said.

The North has offered to resolve U.S. security concerns if Washington signs a nonaggression treaty with it. But the United States has ruled out any talks unless the North first scraps its uranium-based nuclear program.