Hopes for a new round of nuclear crisis talks this year diminished yesterday as US President George W. Bush rejected a North Korean offer to freeze its nuclear facilities in return for major concessions.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman told the official Korean Central News Agency late on Tuesday that Pyongyang would impose the freeze only after it received rewards.
These would include its removal from a US list of nations accused of sponsoring terrorism and the resumption of suspended US oil deliveries.
Bush, following talks on Tuesday with China's Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) at the White House, gave a blunt rebuff to the proposal.
"The goal of the United States is not for a freeze of the nuclear program; the goal is to dismantle a nuclear weapons program in a verifiable and irreversible way," he said, adding "that is a clear message that we are sending to the North Koreans."
Officials in Seoul were closely examining the statement from Pyongyang, which South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan said reflected long-standing North Korean demands.
"We believe North Korea's demands reflect in part those already made during three-way talks in April and the first six-way talks in August," he said.
Yoon said South Korea was still pushing for a new round of six-way talks this year, bringing together the two Koreas, China, Japan, the US and Russia.
China hosted the first round of talks in Beijing in August that failed to break the impasse triggered in October last year.
After the US suspended fuel oil deliveries in retaliation, North Korea kicked out international monitors from its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and said it had nuclear weapons and was reprocessing spent fuel to build more.
Analysts in Seoul said the freeze offer referred only to the plutonium-producing plant at Yongbyon, mothballed under the now-defunct 1994 Agreed Framework, and ignored the uranium program that triggered the current crisis.
"North Korea is talking about Yongbyon only," said Kim Sung-han of the Institute for Foreign Affairs and National Security here. "They have never admitted to the uranium program."
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