North Korea demands two-way talks, US refuses

SEOUL/WASHINGTON - North Korea demanded bilateral talks with the United States over its nuclear weapons programme but Washington quickly rejected the idea and insisted Pyongyang return to six-party negotiations.

"There's plenty of opportunities for North Korea to speak directly with us in the context of the six-party talks," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

North Korea said on Thursday it had acquired nuclear weapons to boost its defences in the face of US hostility and the policy of the White House to seek "regime change," and said it would not return to the multilateral talks.

A North Korean diplomat at the United Nations said in an interview published on Friday: "If the United States wants to talk to us directly, it can be seen as a sign of a change in the US hostile policy toward North Korea."

McClellan insisted President George W Bush will stick to the negotiating format in which the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia negotiate with North Korea.

The six parties have held three rounds of talks since August 2003 and the process has stalled. Countries around the globe had urged North Korea to return to talks on ending its nuclear programme after it said it had nuclear weapons and pulled out of the disarmament discussions.

"All of North Korea's neighbours in the region recognise that this is a regional problem and it requires a multilateral approach for resolving it," McClellan said. "We believe the six-party talks, like North Korea's neighbours, are the way to resolve the situation. "

But US officials held open the possibility of direct talks within the six-party process. "We've done that before. We'd do it again," US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.

The move by the North presents a major challenge to Bush, who also faces a growing crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions, and some analysts said was a dangerous negotiating tactic.

"The assessment is that North Korea may be trying to raise its negotiating stakes," South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Lee Tae-shik was quoted as saying. "But it could turn into a very serious problem if the North takes additional steps."

McClellan said that, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday, "North Korea should have no reason to believe that any nation wants to attack them, that there's a proposal on table that provides the way forward for North Korea to eliminate its nuclear weapons programme and to realise better relations with the international community when they make that commitment. "

While North Korea pulled out of the six-way talks, comments by the deputy chief of North Korea's mission at the United Nations appeared to leave the door open a crack to a possible resumption of negotiations.

"We'll return to the six-party talks if conditions are ripe and such a decision can be justified," South Korea's Hankyoreh newspaper quoted Han Song-ryol as saying in its internet edition on Friday. He added that direct talks would be a change in US "hostile policy" toward the North.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special adviser for North Korea, Maurice Strong, said the world body would work intensively to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table.

"The six-party negotiations have not been cancelled ... I believe that we should regard this not as the end of a negotiating process but as a blip. "

He predicted a peaceful resolution of the crisis "because the consequences of not resolving this issue are so horrendous for all parties. "

Bush has backed a diplomatic solution to the crisis but now faces two nations he once named as part of an "axis of evil " being defiant about their nuclear programmes -- North Korea and Iran. He went to war with Iraq, the third "axis" nation.

China, South Korea and Germany joined calls from the United States and elsewhere for Pyongyang to return to the table.

In the firing line is South Korea, under constant threat from a neighbour that keeps 70 per cent of its 1.2-million-strong army along a border that passes just 65km north of the capital, Seoul.

South Korean officials swiftly joined their US counterparts in saying talks were the only solution to end the North's isolation. They said the news only confirmed what was already known about the North's nuclear ambitions.

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, in Washington on Thursday, said the South could not tolerate the North possessing nuclear weapons.

North Korea sent a message of solidarity to Iran late on Thursday on the 26th anniversary of the Islamic Republic to praise its success in working to defend its sovereignty, a move almost certainly intended to further enrage the United States.

Nuclear proliferation experts said North Korea had probably enough plutonium for as many as eight weapons but no one could say for certain if it could assemble and deliver one.

The crisis over the North's nuclear ambitions erupted in October 2002 when the United States said North Korea had acknowledged it had a secret programme based on highly enriched uranium as well as a plutonium scheme that it had put on hold.

Pyongyang later denied having a uranium project.

- REUTERS