North Korea threatened yesterday to reconsider a moratorium on test-firing missiles if talks on normalizing ties with Japan failed to make progress.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi won a pledge from North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to extend the moratorium, originally set to end next year, at a summit in September where Kim also apologized for abductions of Japanese citizens decades ago.
North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying the communist state's policymakers were "of the view that the DPRK (North Korea) should reconsider the moratorium on the missile test-fire in case the talks on normalizing the relations between the DPRK and Japan get prolonged without making any progress as was the case with the recent talks.
Koizumi said yesterday that Japan was in no mood to give way in the talks but he expected Pyongyang to stick to the moratorium.
US, Japanese and South Korean leaders agreed at a three-way summit late last month to demand that North Korea halt the program and senior US officials will be traveling to Seoul and Tokyo this week for more discussions.
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