Christopher Hill was interviewed for about five minutes this morning on NPR concerning the past two days of discussions with North Korea. The NPR anchor, Renee Montagne, contradicting the State Department spokesman and statements by Hill himself, opened up the piece describing the talks as being for “normalization,” when in reality these talks far too preliminary for that designation. One of the direct questions asked was:

“Now, does North Korea have to, in a sense, ‘fess up on uranium enrichment for talks on normalization to move forward?”

To which Hill replied:

“They sure do. . . They have purchased centrifuges, they have purchased this very specialized aluminum . . . we’ve really got to run that to ground, because we can’t have a situation where there’s some kind of creative ambiguity where we pretend they’ve done something and — or, they pretend they’ve done something and we pretend to believe them. So yeah, we’ve got a lot of work to do on this.” (emphasis added)

In essence, North Korea will have to disclose the extent of their HEU program and the issue would not be resolved until this occurred. Note that the admission must occur for “normalization” to move forward, much less the overarching deal to 950K tons of fuel oil and other aid. It’s likely that inspectors will need to see the equipment the U.S. knows North Korea acquired for the HEU program, and they will be able to determine if the equipment was used, and the grade of uranium enriched, if any.

The deal, Hill, and even Bush have received much criticism, the more withering being from the Right, for not including the word “uranium” in the 13 February deal. As I said at the time, any characterization of the deal not covering uranium was completely false, pointing to the implicit inclusion of uranium in the documents referenced. Later, misleading and dishonest reporting on U.S. estimates of North Korea’s HEU program were highlighted.

I don’t find Hill’s statements surprising in the least, and consider them to be a bit of vindication of my defense of the deal. The bottom line is that no HEU admission and disclosure will result in no deal, which is what I stated all along.

I still believe the deal will ultimately fail, however, due to North Korea inevitably refusing to admit the HEU program, not allowing inspection, or generally reneging.