China must do more to restrain N. Korea, Mullen says - Washington Post

TOKYO - As North Korea on Wednesday startled Seoul by firing artillery off the peninsula's west coast, the top U.S. military official directed sharp criticism at China for its "tacit approval" of North Korea's recent behavior.

In Seoul to meet with South Korea's top defense officials, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described China's "unique influence" and "unique responsibility" to restrain North Korea, which in recent weeks has shelled a South Korean island and revealed an advanced uranium-enrichment facility.

"The Chinese have enormous influence over the North, influence that no other nation on Earth enjoys," Mullen said. "And yet, despite a shared interest in reducing tensions, they appear unwilling to use it. Even tacit approval of Pyongyang's brazenness leaves all their neighbors asking, 'What will be next?' "

Mullen's message for Beijing exposed the fault line separating the Obama administration and the Chinese. China - North Korea's lone ally and primary benefactor - is pushing for a resumption of six-party talks, the process designed to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. But the United States, South Korea and Japan don't feel ready, doubting North Korea's willingness to roll back its nuclear arms ambitions.

On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met in Washington with South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan and Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara for a show of hand-holding and condemnation of North Korea's provocations.

Two South Korean marines and two civilians were killed Nov. 23 when North Korea launched artillery at Yeonpyeong Island, triggering the latest crisis on the often-tense peninsula. Days earlier, North Korea had revealed to a U.S. nuclear specialist a new facility filled with roughly 2,000 centrifuges. North Korea says the uranium program will be used for energy purposes, but it has the capacity to produce highly enriched uranium and expand Pyongyang's nuclear weapons stock.

The lingering anxiety in the South was reflected Wednesday morning, when its military reported hearing North Korean artillery fire near the maritime border. Though the shells landed in North Korean waters, South Korean financial markets were briefly rattled by the news, recovering only when local television stations attributed the fire to military drills, not an attack.

South Korea has held its own live-fire exercises this week, continuing a show of military readiness that North Korea says threatens a "full-scale war." The United States and South Korea last week conducted joint military drills, with more to come. The Yeonpyeong attack - which prompted the resignation of South Korea's defense minister - caused Seoul to reassess its restrained response to the shelling, with new Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin vowing airstrikes against North Korea if the South is attacked again.

Still, Mullen on Wednesday called for caution.

"Rather than meet belligerence in kind, you chose to meet it with restraint and resolve and with readiness," Mullen said of South Korea. "The North should not mistake this restraint as a lack of resolve, nor should they interpret it as willingness to accept continued attacks to go unchallenged."

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North Korea Report Validates Concern, Mullen Says - New York Times

He said that American leaders have long assumed that North Korea continued “to head in the direction of additional nuclear weapons,” and a report in The New York Times on Sunday that Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was recently allowed to view a new and sophisticated plant for enriching uranium bolstered that assumption.

“This validates a long-standing concern we’ve had with regard to North Korea and its enrichment of uranium,” he said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week With Christiane Amanpour.”

The new plant, whose modernistic technology, rich collection of centrifuges and up-to-date control room astonished Dr. Hecker, did not exist in the spring of 2009, just before international weapons inspectors were thrown out of the country. While North Korea has already tested two atomic bombs and produced other nuclear weapons, those were manufactured from the spent fuel harvested from a nuclear reactor, not from enriched uranium.

North Korea insists the uranium is intended for a reactor that would generate electricity. American officials, however, believe the Communist regime there is focused on building more nuclear weapons and fear that without any capacity to inspect, they cannot know for certain.

North Korea is already being punished for flouting inspections with sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council. The Obama administration’s new verbal campaign may be intended to pressure China, North Korea’s most important patron.

However, Admiral Mullen did not express confidence that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, would respond to new pressures.

“He blows hot and cold,” Admiral Mullen said, adding later that the North Korean leader was “predictable in his unpredictability.” “He moves in a certain direction and then reverts, and I certainly would see him in his reversion mode at this particular point in time.”

Admiral Mullen also sought to prop up President Obama’s effort to secure ratification of an arms control treaty with Russia — the so-called New Start — by a two-thirds majority of the United States Senate. The prospects of knitting together that majority seemed to collapse last week when Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the chief Republican negotiator in the Senate on the arms issue, said he would block a vote on the pact in the current lame-duck session of Congress.

The treaty would force both countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals and resume inspections that lapsed last year for the first time since the Cold War.

Clearly targeting his remarks to Republican misgivings about a new treaty, Admiral Mullen said he was “completely comfortable with where we are militarily” and feared only that without a treaty we cannot verify Russian claims about paring its arsenal. He called ratification of a treaty an urgent “national security issue of great significance.”

“We’re close to one year without any ability to verify what’s going on in Russia,” he said.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” reinforced his position, noting that Russia has “thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at the United States,” and that from the Reagan administration on, arms controls treaties “have been overwhelmingly passed.”

Both Admiral Mullen and Mrs. Clinton tried to clarify how long the Obama administration intends to keep American troops in Afghanistan. They said that American units would slowly turn over leadership in combat operations to the Afghan army starting in the spring, but the goal is not to cede that combat role completely until the end of 2014. Afterwards, Americans would continue to advise, equip and train the Afghan army, both said.

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