WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a warning Wednesday about the spread of materials and know-how for making nuclear weapons, including a failure to stop North Korea from developing the bomb and weakness in the U.N. agency responsible for monitoring nuclear programs.
"Unless these trends are reversed _ and reversed soon _ we will find ourselves in a world with a steadily growing number of nuclear-armed states and an increasing likelihood of terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons," Clinton said in a speech laying out the Obama administration's nuclear arms concerns.
Atop her list of key challenges in the spread of nuclear weapons technology, Clinton listed North Korea, which has an active nuclear weapons program in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
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"The international community failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons," she said.
While reiterating the administration's willingness to hold one-on-one talks with North Korea, Clinton said it would be insufficient for that country to simply return to negotiations over its nuclear program.
"Current sanctions will not be relaxed until Pyongyang takes verifiable, irreversible steps toward complete denuclearization," she told members of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank. "Its leaders should be under no illusion that the United States will ever have normal, sanctions-free relations with a nuclear-armed North Korea."
Clinton also faulted Iran, which asserts that it has no intention of building nuclear weapons, for ignoring calls by the U.N. Security Council to suspend its enrichment of uranium. Iran says it is enriching uranium to make fuel required to run a network of electricity-generating nuclear reactors.
She called for prompt action by Iran to execute an emerging plan to use its own low-enriched uranium to refuel a research reactor in Tehran _ an arrangement that would greatly reduce the amount of enriched uranium available to Iran for potential further processing and illicit use in making a nuclear weapon.
Clinton did not mention talks Wednesday in Vienna meant to work out such an arrangement. Iranian negotiators expressed support for the deal, so long as it is accepted by their leaders. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said that negotiators from Iran, the U.S., Russia and France had accepted a draft deal and that he hoped for final approval from all four countries by Friday.
Clinton also lamented the failure of the IAEA under ElBaradei to detect a recently revealed uranium-enrichment facility that Iran had kept secret for some years.
"The IAEA should make full use of existing verification authorities, including special inspections," she said. "But it should also be given new authorities, including the ability to investigate suspected nuclear weapons-related activities even when no nuclear materials are present. And if we expect the IAEA to be a bulwark of the nonproliferation regime, we must also give it the resources necessary to do its job."
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