US, S Korea in top level talks

The United States and South Korea on Saturday held top-level talks to discuss ways to press North Korea to return to disarmament talks, a day after the communist state’s renewed nuclear sabre-rattling.Stephen Bosworth, the White House’s special representative on North Korea, met with Wi Wung-Lac, South Korea’s chief delegate to six-party talks on disarming North Korea, an AFP journalist on the scene said.

Bosworth, who is visiting the region for talks aimed at restarting the six-party talks which the North is boycotting, declined to comment on details of his meeting with Wi pending a press briefing on Sunday.

The foreign ministry said earlier that Bosworth and Wi would assess the situation concerning the North Korean nuclear issue and discuss a coordinated response to the North’s nuclear drive.

In a defiant response to tougher UN sanctions imposed after the nuclear test, North Korea said Friday it was building more plutonium-based atomic weapons and had made progress on enriching uranium.

“Experimental uranium enrichment has successfully been conducted to enter into completion phase,” the official Korean Central News Agency quoted its permanent representative to the United Nations as saying.

“Reprocessing of spent fuel rods is at its final phase and extracted plutonium is being weaponized,” the representative said in a letter to the UN Security Council president.

The US government said it was “very concerned” by the claims, and vowed to stand firm on the tough international sanctions imposed on North Korea in the aftermath of its nuclear and missile tests this year.

“We continue to be committed to ensuring that North Korea upholds its international obligations and we continue to strongly implement the sanctions that were approved,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.“Our goal continues to be, and will continue to be the denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula, he said.The US has repeatedly said it wants Pyongyang to return to six-party disarmament talks, which group the two Koreas, the US, Japan, Russia and China.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: “In general, we are very concerned by these claims that they’re moving closer to the weaponization of nuclear materials.”

South Korea Friday pledged a “stern” response to North Korean “threats and provocations” as Japan’s incoming government Friday said it would maintain a tough stance.

“We will respond with stern sanctions” against Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear activities, said Katsuya Okada, who, it was reported Saturday, is set to become Japan’s new foreign secretary after his Democratic Party of Japan won elections last weekend.

He said it was “extremely regrettable” that North Korea ignored the UN Security Council decisions and took such “provocative actions.” “It’s important to let the North Koreans know — by keeping sanctions against them — that there is nothing to be gained for them if they take such a difficult attitude,” he said.European Union foreign ministers also voiced concern but Russia urged talks on the North Korean nuclear deadlock.

The North had recently struck a more conciliatory note after months of tension, but said Friday it was prepared “for both dialogue and sanctions.” Pyongyang for years denied US allegations of a secret enriched uranium bomb-making program, in addition to the admitted plutonium-based operation which fuelled two nuclear tests, the first staged in 2006.But on June 13, a day after the UN punished Pyongyang’s latest test conducted in May with tighter sanctions, the North vowed to start an enriched uranium program and to extract more plutonium from spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor.

-AFP