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SEOUL: The United States and South Korea on Saturday
held top-level talks to discuss ways to press North Korea to return
to disarmament talks, a day after the communist state’s renewed
nuclear saber-rattling.
Stephen Bosworth, the White
House’s special representative on North Korea, met with Wi Sunglac,
South Korea’s chief delegate to six-party talks on disarming North
Korea, an Agence France-Presse journalist on the scene said.
Bosworth, who is visiting the
region for talks aimed at restarting the six-party talks which the
North is boycotting, declined to comment on details of his meeting
with Wi pending a press briefing on Sunday.
But Yonhap news agency said
Bosworth and Wi reviewed the North’s claim on Friday that it was
building more plutonium-based atomic weapons and had made progress
on enriching uranium and discussed a coordinated response.
“As the North is raising
tensions and making conciliatory gestures at the same time, the two
reviewed the situation and discussed a coordinated response,”
Yonhap quoted an informed source as saying.
In a defiant response to tougher
UN sanctions imposed after the nuclear test, Pyongyang said Friday
that experimental uranium enrichment was entering the completion
phase.
Reprocessing of spent fuel rods
was also in the final phase and extracted plutonium was being
weaponized, it said.
The US government said it was
“very concerned” by the claims, and vowed to stand firm on the
tough international sanctions imposed on North Korea in the
aftermath of its nuclear and missile tests this year.
“We continue to be committed to
ensuring that North Korea upholds its international obligations and
we continue to strongly implement the sanctions that were
approved,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
“Our goal continues to be, and
will continue to be the denuclearization” of the Korean
peninsula, he said.
The US has repeatedly said it
wants Pyongyang to return to six-party disarmament talks, which
group the two Koreas, the US, Japan, Russia and China.
State Department spokesman Ian
Kelly said: “In general, we are very concerned by these claims
that they’re moving closer to the weaponization of nuclear
materials.”
South Korea on Friday pledged a
“stern” response to North Korean “threats and provocations”
as Japan’s incoming government said it would maintain a tough
stance.
“We will respond with stern
sanctions” against Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear activities,
said Katsuya Okada, who, it was reported Saturday, is set to become
Japan’s new foreign minister after his Democratic Party of Japan
won elections last weekend.
He said it was “extremely
regrettable” that North Korea ignored the UN Security Council
decisions and took such “provocative actions.”
“It’s important to let the
North Koreans know—by keeping sanctions against them—that there
is nothing to be gained for them if they take such a difficult
attitude,” he said.
European Union foreign ministers
also voiced concern but Russia urged talks on the North Korean
nuclear deadlock.
The North had recently struck a
more conciliatory note after months of tension, but said Friday it
was prepared “for both dialogue and sanctions.”
Pyongyang for years denied US
allegations of a secret enriched uranium bomb-making program, in
addition to the admitted plutonium-based operation which fuelled two
nuclear tests, the first staged in 2006.
But on June 13, a day after the
UN punished Pyongyang’s latest test conducted in May with tighter
sanctions, the North vowed to start an enriched uranium program and
to extract more plutonium from spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon
reactor.
--AFP
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