North Korea said yesterday that South Korea's secret nuclear experiments involving uranium and plutonium make the communist state more determined to pursue its own nuclear programs.
A spokesman for Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry condemned the "military nature" of the South Korean experiments, conducted in 1982 and 2000, according to the official news agency KCNA.
The unidentified spokesman indicated that the the recent revelations of the South Korean experiments was likely to further complicate the already stalled six-nation talks aimed at dismantling the North's nuclear weapons programs.
"There is strong suspicion that the disclosed experiments might be conducted at the instruction of the United States as they assume military nature," he told KCNA. "We cannot but link these cases to the issue of resuming the six-party talks."
South Korea said on Thursday that it extracted a tiny amount of plutonium, a key element for making atomic bombs, in a 1982 experiment. That revelation followed an acknowledgment last week that in 2000, it enriched a small amount of uranium, another element that could be used to make a bomb.
Accusing Washington of applying "double standards" on the two Koreas, the North yesterday asked "whether the US intends to overlook South Korea's development of nuclear weapons as it did that of Israel."
"It is self-evident that the DPRK can never abandon its nuclear program under such situation," the North Korean spokesman said, using the acronym for the North's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The threat, which follows a pattern of issuing hard-line statements in times of crucial negotiations, came as a delegation of top Chinese government and Communist Party leaders are visiting Pyongyang to discuss issues including the North's nuclear programs.
China has been host to three rounds of six-nation talks on ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions, but those talks ended without breakthroughs.
The talks involve the US, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia.
British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell arrived in Pyongyang yesterday to help persuade the country to end its nuclear programs peacefully and improve its human rights record.
Yesterday, North Korea reiter-ated that Washington should "drop its hostile policy toward the DPRK in practice and opt for seeking an early negotiated settlement of the nuclear issue as justly demanded by the DPRK."
But Seoul's recent acknowl-edgment it had conducted nuclear experiments threatened to further complicate the negotiations. South Korea denies any nuclear weapons ambitions, calling those experiments purely "scientific research activities."
In an interview on Friday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell attached minimal importance to Seoul's nuclear activities.
"It's quite clear that these were not intended other than for academic, experimental pur-poses, and it's over with and I think that's, frankly, the end of the matter," Powell said.
"I don't see any great significance to them, but the North Koreans always like to seize on anything to make their point," he said.
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