Sanctions Against North Korea Won't Work, IAEA Chief Says

Associated Press
October 23, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116165857252601736.html
WASHINGTON -- The only real option for trying to curb North Korea's nuclear weapons program is to talk to the insular government, the head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday.
I don't think sanctions work as a penalty, Mohamed ElBaradei said after a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
They feel they are isolated; they feel they are not getting the security they need, said the Egyptian diplomat, who has run the U.N. agency for nearly a decade.
The U.N. Security Council, largely at the urging of the U.S., has imposed controls on trade in dangerous goods with North Korea. Ms. Rice returned Sunday from a trip to Asia and Russia designed to encourage enforcement of the sanctions and to offer assurances of U.S. security support to anxious allies.
The export controls imposed by the U.N. Security Council are not sufficient to turn North Korea away from building nuclear weapons and other dangerous weapons, Mr. ElBaradei said.
Penalizing them is not the solution, he said.
Mr. ElBaradei's tenure as director general of the IAEA was challenged unsuccessfully two years ago by the Bush administration, suspicious he was soft on Iran and Iraq.
Mr. ElBaradei said it did not matter whether the U.S. talks to North Korea in a six-nation negotiations format that has failed to deter a nuclear test, or one-on-one.
At the end of the day, we have to bite the bullet and talk to North Korea and Iran, he said at Georgetown University's foreign service school.
The administration counters that it is willing to talk to North Korea in the six-nation framework, saying having other nations -- China, Japan, South Korea and Russia -- in the negotiations reinforces the anti-nuclear message.
J.D. Crouch, the White House's deputy national security adviser, told a gathering at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that North Korea's recent nuclear test threatens not just the United States but also the entire world. Other nations with influence in the region should be at the negotiating table.