A North Korean threat to test a nuclear device overshadowed six-way talks in Beijing yesterday after negotiators came up with a series of gestures aimed at resolving the crisis over the North's nuclear ambitions.
U.S. officials said the threat, made in a two-hour meeting between US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and North Korean negotiators in Beijing on Thursday, resembled those from Pyongyang in the past.
The move has raised doubts that even faint progress can be achieved as the third round of talks among North and South Korea, the US, Japan, Russia and China entered their third day. The previous rounds ended with agreement only to meet again.
China's Foreign Ministry cancelled the closing ceremony on Saturday. But the official Xinhua news agency said the negotiations would end as scheduled.
Negotiations have been focused on a US offer of conditional aid and security guarantees to try to break a 20-month-old deadlock in the nuclear crisis. North Korea has put forward its own plan demanding rewards in return for freezing its ambitions.
While few had expected a breakthrough, the US proposal was the most detailed offer since US President George W. Bush took office and branded the North as part of an "axis of evil" alongside Iran and pre-war Iraq.
North Korea has issued no formal statement on the US proposal and its test threat was another sign of the gulf dividing the US and North Korea, the protagonists in a crisis that has simmered since October 2002 when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted having a uranium enrichment program.
North Korea has since denied have any program beyond its plutonium-powered plant but has said fuel from that plant was being reprocessed into fissile material for bombs.
The North raised nuclear arms at the talks, US officials said
"In the course of that discussion, the North Koreans made a reference to testing and they made it as part of an argument why we should accept their proposal right away," said one Bush administration official.
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