N Korea says it's ready for dialogue with US

North Korea told South Korea yesterday that it wanted talks on nuclear weapons with the US as Washington worked with its diplomatic allies to prevent a new Korean peninsula crisis.

South Korean media pool reports quoted the North's No. 2 leader, Kim Yong-nam, as telling the South's visiting unification minister, Jeong Se-hyun, that the communist state was ready for dialogue.

"If the United States is prepared to abandon its hostile policy toward us, we are ready for dialogue to resolve security issues of concern," Kim was quoted as saying.

But, in a reminder of the brinkmanship North Korea has used during previous disputes, state-run radio blamed Washington for endangering a nuclear accord Pyongyang is accused of breaking.

During the George W. Bush administration's first high-level visit to North Korea, Kim Yong-nam told Kelly that Pyongyang was running a secret uranium-enrichment project to support a weapons program.

The bombshell admission, disclosed by the US last week, puts North Korea in violation of at least four international commitments, including a 1994 so-called "Agreed Framework" with the US, which averted an earlier nuclear crisis.

Jeong, heading a South Korean delegation which flew to Pyongyang on Saturday for the first Cabinet-level inter-Korean talks since the revelations, raised the nuclear issue with Kim.

Kelly, who was in Tokyo yesterday after trips to China and South Korea, was quoted as telling Japanese officials that Washington had made no decision on the Agreed Framework.

US of State Colin Powell said on Sunday that "it looks like it's nullified" by Pyongyang's admissions.

North Korea has so far made no public comment on the US disclosure of Pyongyang's admission. Without mentioning the new nuclear weapons revelations, state media blamed Washington.

"The provision of the light water nuclear reactor is greatly delayed and [the agreement] has arrived at a critical juncture of whether to scrap it," Radio Pyongyang said.

Under 1994 Agreed Framework, North Korea pledged to freeze the operation and construction of graphite nuclear reactors suspected of being a part of a covert weapons program.

In exchange, the US agreed to ship 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil annually to North Korea and help it build two "light water" nuclear power reactors.

The reactors are far behind schedule, mostly delayed by North Korean attempts to renegotiate terms and by crises triggered when an North Korean submarine full of commandos landed in the South in 1996 and when Pyongyang fired a missile over Japan in 1998.

Kelly reporters on Saturday that the North Koreans tried to blame Washington when they admitted to the nuclear scheme, but that he told them their claim was "inconsistent with information that we had that the program was already several years old."

In Seoul, an official of the multilateral agency implementing the reactor project, said the nuclear revelations so far had no impact on fuel oil shipments already in the pipeline and on working-level meetings with North Korea.

"We will continue to be committed to the project unless reverse decisions are made, but so far we were not notified of any modifications to the ongoing projects," said Chang Sun-sup, a Unification Ministry official.