Rice to challenge North Korea to return to nuke talks

TOKYO - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will challenge North Korea on Saturday to give up its nuclear weapons as she presses partners in Asia to make Pyongyang return to six-party arms talks.

With US impatience over the talks rising, Rice will use a major foreign policy speech in Tokyo to tell North Korea to make a "strategic choice" to abandon its weapons programmes, senior administration officials said.

She will also urge Asian partners in the talks, Japan, South Korea and particularly North Korea's biggest benefactor, China, to do more to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiations that have been on hold since June, they said.

"The North Koreans have to make a strategic choice and they have to make it now," said one official, previewing the message of Rice's speech to be delivered at the Sophia University.

"Time is not on our side," he added, recalling a phrase Vice President Dick Cheney used a year ago that sparked fears among the Asian partners that Washington wanted to end the talks and confront North Korea at the United Nations.

While Washington wants its Asian partners to exert more pressure on North Korea, they, in turn, have called on the United States to show greater "flexibility" to revive the talks, which also involve Russia.

The top US diplomat's address on Saturday is the key speech of her first trip as secretary of state to Asia and will seek to outline a vision for strengthening US relationships with democratic countries in the region.

She will also urge reforms in China and complain about Japan's ban on US beef imports.

Rice has visited India, Pakistan and Afghanistan and, after Japan, she flies to South Korea and on to China.

In the speech, Rice will refrain from using language that could provoke North Korea, which has demanded an apology because Rice earlier this year referred to the country as an "outpost of tyranny".

She will seek to avoid getting into "rhetorical arguments, which is just what the North Koreans want", another official said.

Washington believes North Korea is using Rice's rhetoric as an excuse to shun the talks because it wants to avoid having to choose whether it should cut a deal to scrap its programmes in exchange for security guarantees and economic aid, the officials said.

Despite the US need for China's support on North Korea, Rice will prod Beijing to develop a more open society in remarks likely to irk a Chinese leadership sensitive to what it sees as foreign meddling in its domestic affairs.

While Rice will hold up the Japanese-US relationship as exemplary and propose a special alliance to co-ordinate the two countries' aid donations, Rice also appeared set to court controversy by complaining over beef imports.

"The secretary will make a strong statement on that point -- that the time has come to solve this problem," one official said.

In late 2003, after the United States reported its first case of mad cow disease, Tokyo imposed a ban on imports of US beef worth more than $1 billion a year.

Japan agreed in October to allow shipments of beef from young US cattle but Washington has become increasingly frustrated because Tokyo has not worked through the technical details necessary to implement the accord.

She is unlikely during her visit to win a commitment from Japanese officials on a deadline for lifting the ban.

- REUTERS