From ABC News:
Burt Herman
China has reduced shipments of crude oil to North Korea, apparently in response to Pyongyang’s missile tests, a news report said Saturday.
China, the communist North’s closest ally and key provider of oil, also has agreed with South Korea to cooperate to prevent a possible North Korean nuclear test.
South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper said China has reduced “a significant amount” of its oil supplies to Pyongyang since the July 5 missile launches.
The report cited unnamed officials at an oil storage terminal near the Chinese border city of Dandong.
Officials could not be reached for comment Saturday.
There are growing concerns, bolstered by reports of suspicious activity, that Pyongyang may be planning to follow up its missile launches with a nuclear test. Pyongyang claims to have nuclear weapons but hasn’t performed any known test.
Song Min-soon, South Korea’s presidential security adviser, said Saturday that a North Korean nuclear test would be “a grave situation of a different level from missile launches and that South Korea and China have agreed to continue cooperation not to let that situation occur.”
Song, who returned from a two-day trip to Beijing on Friday, refused to elaborate how the two countries would cooperate.
South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States have tried in six-party talks to convince the North to abandon its nuclear program.
South Korea’s seismic authorities said they detected a tremor in North Korea on Friday, but ruled out an underground nuclear test.
Talks on the North’s nuclear program have been stalled since November, when negotiators failed to make headway in implementing the North’s agreement to drop its nuclear program in exchange for aid and security guarantees.
Pyongyang has since refused to attend the six-party talks until Washington stops blacklisting a bank where the North’s regime held accounts, a restriction imposed over alleged counterfeiting and money laundering.
