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North Korea says willing to resolve nuclear crisis

Posted on: Thursday, 21 July 2005, 10:29 CDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korea is willing to resolve a crisis over its nuclear arms program at next week's six-party talks in Beijing, but said normalizing relations with Washington was key to a deal, Chinese media said on Thursday.

The comments were a positive signal ahead of the negotiations set to begin on Tuesday that the United States has said should make progress, rather than being "talks for talks' sake" after three previous rounds yielded no agreement.

"Not a single nuclear weapon will be needed for us if the U.S. nuclear threat is removed and its hostile policy of 'bringing down the DPRK's system' is withdrawn," the official Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

North Korea's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

North Korea has called for normalizing ties with the United States before, but has not recently linked it as a condition that could lead to a negotiated settlement at the six-party talks.

A fourth round of talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia will open in Beijing on Tuesday.

Pyongyang cited what it calls Washington's hostile policy toward it as the reason for refusing to participate in the talks for more than one year and said it agreed to come back after the United States said it would recognize North Korea as a sovereign state.

The basic premise of the talks is for North Korea to dismantle all its nuclear weapons programs in a verifiable manner in exchange for much-needed aid for its moribund economy and security guarantees.

The communist state repeated calls for the its removal from the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism, and the lifting of all sanctions against it, Xinhua added.

"The spokesman stressed that it's the DPRK's persistent attitude to realize the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and consultation," the report said.

North Korea said explicitly for the first time in February that it had nuclear weapons, ratcheting up the crisis that began in 2002 over what Washington said was its enrichment of uranium that could be used to make weapons.

Source: REUTERS

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