North Korea shuts down nuclear reactor

North Korea shuts down nuclear reactor

The UN inspection, the first since 2002, comes amid hopes that years of delicate international negotiations could finally get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

The arrival of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team is part of a February 13 deal under which North Korea agreed to scrap the program in exchange for aid and security guarantees.

"We have all the equipment with us" to begin inspections, the head of the IAEA team, Adel Tolba, told reporters before leaving Beijing. "We will resume our role when we arrive."

US chief nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said Saturday that North Korea's main nuclear facility will shut down by Monday.

"We understood [that it would shut down] this weekend, so I don't know whether it's Saturday, Sunday or Monday," said Hill in Tokyo.

"I do know it's very soon," he said.

Hill stressed that the shutdown of the plutonium-producing Yongbyon reactor was only the first step of the February deal. Hill is in Tokyo ahead of a resumption of six-nation talks in Beijing in the coming week on ending North Korea's nuclear program.

"Declaration is one of the early next steps. We would expect a comprehensive list, declaration, to be in a matter of several weeks, possibly a couple of months. We see it as coming before disabling of the facilities," he said.

"I also don't want people to think this shutdown is the biggest and only event. It's just the first step."

North Korea previously kicked out UN weapons inspectors and pulled out of the global Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as it defied international opinion in pursuit of an atomic weapon.

North Korea, impoverished and virtually closed off from the rest of the world, then tested its first nuclear bomb in October last year—angering even its sole major ally China, which agreed to international sanctions on Pyongyang.

But the February agreement raised hopes that one of the countries in the US "axis of evil"—along with Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq—might give up its nuclear weapons campaign.

Pyongyang said it would not budge until it received a first shipment of fuel oil as part of the disarmament deal. A tanker arrived with that shipment early Saturday, a South Korean unification ministry spokesman said.

"I think the unloading of the shipment will take about 12 hours," the spokesman said.

The inspectors visited Pyongyang for talks late last month, and Tolba expressed optimism Friday that the process would go smoothly.

"With the kind of help we have got from the DPRK [North Korea] in the last few weeks, we think we will do our job in a successful way," Tolba said.

North Korea has repeatedly said it needs an atomic weapon to deter an attack from the United States, which it says wants to topple its communist regime. U.S. officials say the North may have material to make several crude bombs.

North and South Korea went to war in 1950 and no peace treaty to end the conflict, in which the United States led UN troops in battle, has never been signed.

On Friday, the North Korean military proposed direct talks with the United States military about peace on the peninsula—an offer Hill appeared Saturday to brush aside.

"I think people need to understand that any peace process, peace mechanism, is one that would be done by directly related governments, not militaries," Hill said.

The United States wants North Korea to disband its nuclear arsenal before signing a permanent accord to officially end the Korean War and put aside their Cold War hostilities.

It has withdrawn nuclear weapons from South Korea but still maintains 29,500 troops there to back up the South Korean army.