North Korea's threat to display a "nuclear deterrent" at an appropriate time was dismissed in South Korea yesterday as bluff, and US officials said they saw nothing new in the latest escalatory rhetoric from Pyongyang.
In comments published late on Thursday by the North's official KCNA news agency, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said the country would move to end debate over its nuclear status if the US delayed a solution to a year-old nuclear impasse.
"When an appropriate time comes, the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] will take a measure to open its nuclear deterrent to the public as a physical force and then there will be no need to have any more argument," the spokesman said, noting that some people doubted that the North had nuclear capability.
Thursday's statement did not spell out how Pyongyang might display its "deterrent." It did not use the word "test".
In Washington on Thursday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters: "They've said things like that before, and I don't know what they mean."
Earlier this month, North Korea said it had redirected plutonium extracted from thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods to help enhance its deterrent force. In 1994, US intelligence officials estimated the North had processed enough plutonium for two bombs. The New York Times reported this week there could be more.
South Korean officials said they saw another attempt by Pyongyang to grab US attention.
"This looks like bluffing," said Rhee Bong-jo, policy chief of the National Security Council, telling reporters that South Korea should avoid overreacting to the statement.
But in a fresh reminder of the intractibility of the year-old dispute, four days of Cabinet-level talks between the two Koreas ended in deadlock yesterday, with Pyong-yang rejecting Seoul's call to agree to an early resumption of multilateral talks.
President Roh Moo-hyun's national security adviser said the North was trying to raise the stakes in future negotiations.
"This looks like another negotiating card it is playing," Ra Jong-yil told reporters, referring to the North's threat. "They are trying to gain the upper hand in the next round of six-party talks."
China, Russia, the two Koreas, Japan and the US held an inconclusive first round of talks in Beijing in August. All sides pledged to avoid steps that would aggravate the dispute and all the parties except North Korea said they sought another round of talks.
The North's statement said a fresh round of six-way talks would be meaningless unless the US dropped its hostility toward North Korea. But it did not rule out further talks as it has previously done.
US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters in Washington that the US was working to open another round of six-way talks next month.
"What it does underscore is the concern that we all have about North Korea's nuclear program, and the need to work together in a multilateral way, through the six-party talks, to bring about the complete, irreversible and verifiable end to that program," he said.
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