N. Korea Vows to Boycott Nuclear Talks After U.N. Rebuke

GWEN IFILL:

Today, North Korea announced they are pulling out of nuclear talks intended to slow their weapons program. That came a day after the United Nations issued a statement criticizing a recent test missile launch.

For more, we go to Balbina Hwang, who was a State Department adviser on the Korean nuclear negotiations until January. She now teaches at the National Defense University. And Selig Harrison, the director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, he's visited North Korea 11 times, most recently in January.

Welcome to you both.

Is stepping away — Balbina Hwang, I'll start with you — is stepping away from these negotiations a really hostile act?

BALBINA HWANG, National Defense University:

Well, it's not hostile, but it's certainly not helpful. And it does raise serious questions about how we will proceed to get to what the international community has said we wanted to do, which is to denuclearize North Korea and, in fact, what North Korea had declared that it would do several years ago.

GWEN IFILL:

Was this a surprising step that they took today, Mr. Harrison?

SELIG HARRISON, Center for International Policy: Not at all. You know that on March 26th they said very explicitly that if even one word of criticism of their missile launch came out of the United Nations, they would discontinue the six-party negotiating process on nuclear weapons, which it started in 2005.

Now, that doesn't rule out bilateral negotiations starting with the United States. So I think this is a very significant development, a regrettable development.

I think, really, in retrospect, we're going to look back on it as one of the first big foreign policy mistakes of the Obama administration, because we knew this was coming. The North Koreans made it very clear. And they…