The White House said Monday that Barack Obama would likely stand firm in opposing North Korea’s nuclear programs and dismissed Pyongyang’s atomic defiance as a childish tantrum.
“It’s not surprising that they would bang their spoons on their high chair to try to get attention,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said after the North said it may keep its nuclear arms and threatened confrontation with South Korea.
Pyongyang’s foreign ministry said Saturday that it would retain its atomic weaponry as long as it feels under nuclear threat from Washington.
Hours later, its military called for an “all-out confrontational posture” against South Korea, prompting Seoul to order its armed forces on alert along the land and sea border.
“I think that the North Koreans will find that they (Obama’s team) will be just as against North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs as the Bush administration has been,” said Perino.
“What we leave to the new administration is a diplomatic process where all of North Korea’s neighbors are at the table, united against their nuclear ambitions, and it’s through that diplomatic process that they (Obama’s team) will succeed,” said Perino.
She was referring to the six-party denuclearization talks grouping China, Japan, Russia, North and South Korea, and the United States.
US secretary of state designate Hillary Clinton took a tough line on North Korea during at a Senate confirmation hearing last week and said that the Obama administration favored the six-party negotiations.
She also vowed a “very aggressive effort” against North Korea’s alleged role in atomic weapons proliferation.
“We have got to end North Korea as a proliferator… So we will embark upon a very aggressive effort to try to determine the best way forward to achieve our objectives with them,” Clinton said during a question-and-answer session.
“Our goal is to end the North Korean nuclear program — both the plutonium reprocessing program and the highly enriched uranium program, which there is reason to believe exists, although never quite verified,” Clinton said.
“It is our strong belief that the six-party talks… is a vehicle for us to exert pressure on North Korea in a way that is more likely to alter their behavior,” the 61-year-old senator from New York told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“I have no illusions about that. I think it takes tough, reality-based diplomacy to determine what is doable,” she said.
Negotiations are deadlocked over differences over how to determine whether North Korea is telling the truth about scrapping its nuclear programs.
