The Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul next month will seek to strengthen the partnerships of nations to help prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The Seoul summit of more than 50 heads of state and international organizations on March 26-27 will also take specific actions to protect nuclear materials from illicit trafficking and smuggling. They will discuss ways to give the International Atomic Energy Agency the resources and authority it needs to meet its responsibilities.
North Korean officials and some opposition politicians and activists here do not seem to understand these clear agenda or are deliberately distorting them. President Lee, the summit host, invited North Korea to attend on condition that it agrees with the international community on the goal of denuclearization. Pyongyang turned the invitation down and denounced the event as a “grave provocation” against the DPRK.
A joint statement issued Wednesday by the North’s three state auxiliary organizations purportedly dedicated to “peace” and “denuclearization” warned that Pyongyang would not tolerate the nuclear security summit in what they described as “the forward base of the United States’ nuclear warfare and the world’s greatest nuclear ammunition depot.”
North Koreans may be wary about the occasional appearance of U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in South Korean waters for joint naval exercises, but they must know that South Korea has been completely denuclearized since the U.S. forces withdrew their nuclear arms from here under an agreement between North and South Korea in 1992.
Denunciation of the nuclear security forum also came from a coalition of left-wing political parties and civic organizations of South Korea. The “counteraction group” has a different reason to oppose the Seoul meeting. Its manifesto claimed that the existing nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants pose the greatest security threat, rather than imagined nuclear terrorists.
As we compared the opposition moves of the North Koreans and the leftist coalition in South Korea, we found something in common between them. They both are afraid that President Lee will use the forum to press Pyongyang to give up its nuclear armament programs.
Pyongyang’s reaction is rather understandable, despite the absence of logic. The South Korean group does not clarify its opposition to the North Korean nuclear armament but they chide the Seoul government for not seeking to create an environment favorable to resolve the problem through inter-Korean dialogue.
The Seoul summit is aimed to keep nuclear weapons from finding their way into the hands of al-Qaida. The opponents here talk little about terrorist threats but are against the peaceful use of nuclear energy. They go further to suspect that Seoul is bent on sales promotion of its nuclear power generation technology through the summit meeting. We are amazed by the great imagination of the activists while we regret their indifference to the worst threats to humanity.
