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SCMP Reporter

WASHINGTON: Senate Republicans yesterday harshly criticised the deal freezing North Korea's nuclear programme, but said Congress should not renege and may be pushed into approving funds for it.

  They said at a Senate hearing that President Bill Clinton promised North Korea in a secret letter that he would try to finance the US$4 billion (HK$30.9 billion) cost of two power reactors for Pyongyang under the deal if South Korea and Japan would not.

   They also said there was no assurance North Korea would keep its word and halt nuclear weapons development.

  Top Clinton administration officials are visiting Southeast Asia to solicit funds for the project.

  State and Defence department officials will visit Brunei today, Malaysia on Monday and Singapore on Tuesday. One US official called the tour a 'tin cup exercise'.

  The visits will be made by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard and a Defence Department official of similar rank, Kent Wiedemann.

  Senator Frank Murkowski, chairing a Senate Energy Committee hearing on the deal, said that even though it had been described as nuclear blackmail, 'I do not believe that we should renege on this agreement'.

  Republican Senator John McCain said North Korea had a long history of breaking its word and there was no assurance it would not resume building nuclear weapons after receiving the reactors and oil from US-led allies.

  But Senator McCain said Congress should approve US$10 million the Clinton administration requested on Wednesday for safe storage of 8,000 fuel rods North Korea has agreed to give up - and said it would be hard to defeat other funding.

  'What the administration has done is put us into a box that is very difficult for us to get out of because if we refuse now to fund portions of this agreement then of course we can be held responsible for the whole thing coming apart,' he said.

  The comments came at the first of a series of what are sure to be unfriendly hearings in the new Republican Congress on the deal for North Korea to freeze and eventually disband its nuclear programme in return for the two electric power nuclear reactors and 500,000 tonnes of oil over 10 years.

   North Korea agreed in October to replace its current generation of nuclear reactors with modern light-water reactors that produce very little of the plutonium needed to make nuclear bombs.

  Financing will be provided by an international consortium led by South Korea and Japan. The United States is expected to provide modest but as yet unspecified funding.

  Another aspect of the agreement calls for moves towards full normalisation of economic and political ties between the United States and North Korea.

   A White House announcement on those issues is expected today.

  Congress has been wary about the agreement on grounds that North Korea cannot be counted on to fulfil its end of the bargain. The administration argues that the agreement headed off a North Korean plan to build dozens of nuclear weapons in the coming years.

  Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Defence Secretary William Perry are scheduled to testify on the agreement on Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

   They are expected to be questioned closely about how much the agreement will cost the US.

  US, South Korean and Japanese negotiators yesterday ended two days of talks in Tokyo with progress in discussions on the setting-up of a consortium to provide new nuclear technology to North Korea.



Dismay over nuclear deal