World News North Korea overture seen as tiny step on rocky, unpromising road

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) - In floating the possibility of nuclear talks with the United States, North Korea took a first step on a road likely to be long, more arduous and just as prone to failure as past efforts.

Former U.S. officials who have dealt with the North reacted with deep skepticism to Pyongyang’s offer, made public by South Korea, to hold talks with the United States on denuclearization and to halt nuclear and missile tests while negotiating.

While arguing it is worth testing the waters to see if North Korea is willing to give up its nuclear program, and to glean intelligence from dealing with the secretive nation’s officials, they see virtually no chance Pyongyang will actually do so.

“For the past three decades, (administrations) of both political parties have tried every single option ... except the use of military force and none of these have halted the North,” said Mitchell Reiss, a senior U.S. diplomat under Republican former President George W. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un talks with the South Korean delegation led by Chung Eui-yong, head of the presidential National Security Office, in Pyongyang, North Korea, March 6, 2018. The Presidential Blue House/Yonhap via REUTERS/File Photo

Bush who has negotiated with North Korea.

North Korea is likely to make demands that the United States would find anathema following Pyongyang’s reported statement that it has no need for a nuclear program “if military threats against the North are resolved and its regime is secure,” former U.S. officials said.

North Korea in the past has sought the withdrawal of U.S. forces in South Korea and the wider

region, effectively meaning an end to the U.S.South Korean alliance, something Washington could not accept.

“This is the sort of rhetoric that one encounters at the bare beginnings of a process that can last years, and of course the only processes that have been run with North Korea on the nuclear issue have come a cropper,” said a former U.S. official involved in talks with North Korea who spoke on

condition of anonymity, using an idiom meaning failed.

FRESH MEMORIES OF FAILURE

Under the 1994 “Agreed Framework” negotiated under Democratic former U.S. President Bill Clinton, North Korea committed to freeze and dismantle its nuclear facilities in return for two lightwater reactors and fuel oil while the BRASILIA, (Reuters) - Brazil’s top appeals court on Tuesday denied a request by former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that he not be sent to prison on a corruption conviction before he has exhausted his appeals.

The decision by the Superior Court of Justice makes it more likely that Lula, whose conviction on corruption charges was upheld in January by a lower appeals court, could be forced to begin serving out his 12-year sentence in a matter of weeks, even as he appeals to higher courts.

Lula, Brazil’s first working-class president, oversaw years of robust growth and falling inequality during a commodity boom last decade and has said he wants to run again for the presidency in October. He leads all early polls.

However, he is likely to be blocked from running by a law that bars the candidacy of any politician with a criminal conviction upheld on appeal.

Lula faces six other corruption-related trials. Even if he is found guilty in one of the other trials, it is unlikely there would be any appeals decisions in those cases before the October election.

nuclear power plants were built.

That pact unraveled after Bush took office in 2001, with relations souring when he called North Korea part of an “axis of evil” and accused it of running a uranium enrichment program in violation of the 1994 deal.

The Bush administration ultimately engaged in “sixparty” talks that achieved a deal in September 2005 under which North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear program in return for economic and energy aid and an end to its diplomatic isolation.

Those talks included the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Relations again deteriorated when the United States froze North Korean accounts at a Macau bank in late 2005 and accused it of money laundering and when Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006.