Mixed marks for US intel chief's North Korea nuke comments

TOKYO (AP) — Getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program has long been the holy grail of multilateral diplomacy with Pyongyang.

An unidentified government official told the Yonhap news agency that Seoul and Washington remain strongly committed to ending the North's nuclear program.

Despite the closeness of Seoul to the world's most heavily armed border and Pyongyang's many threats to annihilate its southern rival, many South Koreans simply don't worry much about what's happening with the North or the long-running, so-far futile efforts to rid it of its nuclear weapons.

"Experts and people are not surprised because the perception that North Korea would never give up its nuclear weapons is already widely accepted," said Narushige Michishita, a professor at Tokyo's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

"[...] that he said that the best the U.S. could get is some kind of a cap on North Korea's nuclear capabilities, the new U.S. president can choose to set the freezing of nuclear weapons as a policy objective, which I believe has been the only realistic and achievable goal for a long time," Michishita said.

Shi Yuanhua, Korean studies professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, suggested that Clapper's remarks reflect a more realistic and flexible approach in Washington that could make it easier for Beijing to get behind joint efforts to bring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un back to the negotiating table — though he agreed that won't necessarily mean any easy breakthroughs.

Taking a different tack, Shen Dingli, the director of Fudan's Center for American Studies, said official acceptance of North Korea as a de facto nuclear state may bring U.S. policy toward North Korea closer into alignment with its approach toward other nuclear states such as India, Israel and Pakistan.