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N Korea says US must change policy

North Korea dismissed any idea it wanted US President George W. Bush to lose November's US presidential election, saying yesterday the key for the winner -- Democrat or Republican -- would be to change policy towards Pyongyang.

A day earlier, the secretive communist state threatened to boost the nuclear deterrent it says it has and blamed the US stance in recent six-party talks for forcing its hand. Washington dismissed the apparently tougher line from Pyongyang as rhetoric.

Analysts say little progress on curbing North Korea's nuclear programs was now likely before the US presidential elections in November, thus giving Pyongyang more time to try to develop a nuclear capability.

Pyongyang denied it could be stalling in six-way talks over its nuclear ambitions to see whether a more amenable Democratic US president is elected, saying it did not care which party's candidate triumphed in the US presidential election.

"Whoever [is] elected US president should be willing to make a switchover in its policy toward the DPRK, drop the hostile policy toward it and express readiness to coexist with it," the official KCNA news agency said. The initials DPRK stand for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"This is a main point," it said.

"If the US makes a switchover in its policy toward the DPRK, though belatedly, progress will be made in the settlement of the nuclear issue," KCNA said.

In Seoul, South Korea's chief nuclear negotiator voiced hopes that initial working group meetings, which were agreed at the Beijing talks, could be held between April and June before a new round of six-party talks.

"We will make our best efforts to get the North Korean nuclear issue to a settlement phase through a third round of talks after holding one or two working group meetings during the second quarter of the year," Yonhap news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck as saying.

The US has demanded the "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of the North's nuclear programs that are believed to involve plutonium and uranium.

The North Korean statement on Wednesday voiced anger at such demands and followed similar shows of defiance since six-way talks involving the two Koreas, China, the US, Japan and Russia in Beijing last month.

"The reckless US stance only pushes the DPRK to further increase its nuclear deterrent force," the state-run KCNA news agency on Wednesday cited a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

The impasse "does nothing bad to the DPRK as it will have time to take more necessary steps with increased pace", he said.

In Washington, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said North Korea's latest statement did not reflect the position Pyongyang took at the negotiations.

US officials say they believe North Korea already possesses one or two nuclear weapons and could be making more.

The US has said it is in no hurry to put together a deal because it wants to take time to come up with an accord that will stick.

However, analysts on North Korea said the administration of Bush, who has branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and pre-war Iraq, may prefer to intensify the pressure.

"The administration seems incapable of making any kind of deal or doing serious negotiations," said Daniel Pinkston, a North Korean expert at the Monterey Institute's Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in California.

Pinkston said he saw small signs of gradual convergence on the plutonium program, although he expected no progress before the US elections.

"The North Koreans are going to wait until after the election because they saw a big policy reverse after Clinton," he said.
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