Washington - US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday that the United States will never establish normalized relations with North Korea as long as the Stalinist state has nuclear weapons. "Current sanctions will not be relaxed until Pyongyang takes verifiable, irreversible steps toward complete denuclearization," Clinton said. "Its leaders should be under no illusion that the United States will ever have normal, sanctions-free relations with a nuclear-armed North Korea."
Clinton's remarks came during a speech at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington to outline US nuclear and global non-proliferation policies. North Korea has twice carried out detonations of nuclear weapons in recent years and progress has been slow to resume six-nation nuclear disarmament talks with Pyongyang.
Clinton said international treaties must be strengthened to prevent more countries from obtaining nuclear weapons and preventing terrorists from acquiring the technology. She said the UN nuclear monitoring body known as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) does not have the resources to ensure nations are complying with their international obligations.
She pointed to the Vienna-based IAEA's failure to detect Syria's construction of a nuclear reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes in September 2007, or Iran's second uranium enrichment plant that had been kept secret until September, after the United States provided the IAEA with intelligence showing its existence.
"The International Atomic Energy Agency doesn't have the tools or authority to carry out its mission effectively," she said. "We saw this in the institution's failure to detect Iran's covert enrichment plant and Syria's reactor project."
"If we expect the IAEA to be a bulwark of the nonproliferation regime, we must give it the resources necessary to do the job," she said.
The IAEA must be given greater authority to conduct inspections and penalize countries in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, she added.
Clinton's speech also came as a second day of IAEA-led negotiations with Iran wrapped up in Vienna. Those talks are focused on a proposal for Tehran to send uranium it has already enriched to a third country to prepare it for use in a nuclear energy reactor. It's part of a broader effort to persuade Iran to come clean about its nuclear activities the United States and its allies suspect is aimed at building atomic weapons.
Clinton said the enriched uranium proposal was a "constructive beginning" but still needed to be "followed up by constructive actions" now that President Barack Obama has decided to reach out to Iran through diplomatic channels.
"The process of engagement cannot be open-ended," Clinton said. "We are not prepared to talk just for the sake of talking."
Iranian officials said they will respond to the proposal by Friday. Obama has said he will pursue another round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran if negotations fail to satisfy international concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Clinton said the United States remained committed to slashing its nuclear weapons stockpiles and that progress was being made in negotations with Russia on a new reduction treaty to replace the current one that expires December 5.
Reaching a new agreement with Russia is part of Obama's vision outlined in an April speech in Prague to create a world free of nuclear weapons.
"We can reduce our stockpiles of nuclear weapons without posing any risk to our homeland, our deployed troops or our allies," Clinton said. "In doing so, it will help convince the rest of the international community to strengthen non-proliferation controls and tighten the screws on states that flout their nonproliferation commitments."
The Obama administration will also step up efforts to win Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Clinton said. The United States signed the treaty more than 10 years ago but the Senate rejected it in 1999. Obama's predecessor, George W Bush, never sought Senate approval. The United States has not carried out a nuclear test, however, since 1992, effectively living up to its obligations under the test ban treaty.
"A test-ban treaty that has entered into force will allow the United States and others to challenge states engaged in suspicious testing activities," Clinton said.
