The New York Times:
BEIJING — Secretary of State John Kerry warned China on Wednesday that North Korea was moving ahead with an effort to manufacture a nuclear weapon small enough to fit atop a long-range missile that could reach American shores, and said the United States “will do what is necessary to protect the people of our country.”
Mr. Kerry’s statement came during a one-day stop in Beijing to see the country’s leadership, during which he warned that if China failed to do more to curb North Korea’s enhanced nuclear capacity, Washington would take steps that Chinese leaders have strongly opposed, including deploying defense systems to protect American allies in Asia.
“This is a threat the United States must take extremely seriously,” Mr. Kerry said of North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal and its missile capability at a news conference with the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi.
“The United States will take all necessary steps to protect our people and allies. We don’t want to heighten security tensions. But we won’t walk away from any options.”
The United States has been concerned for half a decade about when North Korea will succeed in the difficult task of mating a nuclear weapon to an accurate missile — and it has already taken the North more time than American intelligence agencies once estimated.
Almost exactly five years ago this month, Robert M. Gates, then the secretary of defense, on a similar trip to Beijing, warned his Chinese counterparts that he believed the North was within five years of reaching that milestone. To date they have not — it is unclear whether the North Koreans have designed a warhead small enough to fit atop the missile and able to withstand the stresses of atmospheric re-entry — and this week American officials would not say how far they believe the North is from that goal.
In interviews, American officials say Mr. Kerry made the case that the nuclear and missile threat was “a direct threat to the U.S.,” a way of explaining to the Chinese why North Korea’s fourth nuclear test cannot be shrugged off as merely symbolic.
Yet the Chinese have been resisting broad new sanctions against Pyongyang, just as they stripped such sanctions out of a United Nations resolution in 2013, after the North’s last nuclear test. Instead, the officials say, Beijing is pressing for targeted sanctions against individuals in the North Korean nuclear complex, which are unlikely to have serious repercussions.
Mr. Kerry adopted the tough tone after nearly five hours of talks with Mr. Wang that were dominated by North Korea and what the United States and China, a treaty ally of the North, should do in the aftermath of the latest nuclear test. Mr. Kerry was referring to the deployment of a missile defense system to South Korea that has been under discussion for some time but that the South, an American ally, has resisted because of China’s opposition. The system is called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad; China views it as a threat to its own capabilities in the Pacific.
China agreed during the talks on Wednesday to approve some form of new United Nations sanctions against the North, but one American official said “that’s different from sanctions that hurt.” A draft of new sanctions was sent to China about 10 days ago, but by the time Mr. Kerry arrived in Beijing, China had not responded in substance, American officials said.
But after the North Korean test on Jan. 6, the South’s president, Park Guen-hye, said she would consider accepting the missile system, as the United States had long insisted.
Negotiations on their content will proceed in the coming days, Mr. Wang said. But these new sanctions “must not provoke new tensions,” he added.
Suggesting that the Obama administration was evincing a little too much concern about the North Korean nuclear test, and that Washington’s attention would soon drift away, Mr. Wang said China “will not be swayed by specific events or the temporary mood of the moment.”
Mr. Wang stuck to a basic theme, that China’s preference is the reconvening of talks on North Korea. “Sanctions are not an end in themselves,” he said.
Mr. Kerry, however, made clear that Washington’s position was that China, North Korea’s biggest trading partner, needed to use its leverage and what he called its “connections” with the country to pressure it to give up its nuclear arsenal.
The Americans would like China to curb exports of oil, including aviation fuel, that help keep the bare-bones North Korean economy afloat. It has also asked China to crack down on its banks and businesses that give the North access to foreign exchange.
A bill calling for sanctions against Chinese entities that help North Korea in its military programs, criminal activities and money laundering recently passed with strong support in the House of Representatives.
As part of his attempt to persuade Beijing, Mr. Kerry used the example of the recent Iran deal: The restrictions on Iran’s banks and financial institutions to conduct transactions abroad helped bring that country to the negotiating table over itsnuclear program, a feat that Mr. Kerry led and that China supported, along with Russia.
Mr. Kerry used the news conference to urge China to take similar actions against North Korea and to create another “united front.”
“With all due respect, more significant and impactful sanctions were put against Iran, which did not have nuclear weapons, than against North Korea, which does,” Mr. Kerry said.
The secretary faces a tough sell. President Xi Jinping of China made a decision last year that it was better for China to have a friendly, nuclear-armed North Korea on its border than a hostile, nuclear-armed North Korea, Chinese analysts have said.
“For China, the worst-case scenario is you push North Korea over to become an enemy with nuclear weapons,” said Zhang Baohui, director of the Center for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “I think China has decided to tolerate North Korea as a nuclear state.”…
