Pyongyang Damps Hope for Nuclear Deal

Like a bride on her wedding day, North Korea has again exercised its right to delay and perhaps even abandon walking up the aisle.

The last round of multilateral talks to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons programme had been scheduled to take place last September. Lately, North Korea's dialogue partners were feeling more confident that a return to the table to discuss the latest US offer was imminent.

Only last month, after two visits by US congressmen to North Korea, the official KCNA news agency said the regime was ready to settle the nuclear issue peacefully and even to treat Washington as a "friend".

President George W. Bush made only one, innocuous mention of North Korea in his State of the Union address last month. His restraint was interpreted by some as removing the last hurdle to resuming talks, after Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, had put North Korea in a list of six "outposts of tyranny".

But North Korea, in characteristically unpredictable manner, on Thursday sluiced cold water on those hopes, saying it would suspend its participation indefinitely in the talks with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US.

It also stated publicly and explicitly for the first time that it had manufactured nuclear weapons under Mr. Bush's watch. The US had assumed North Korea had built one or two nuclear devices in the 1990s, but said it was unsure whether more bombs had been made from the plutonium reprocessed after North Korea expelled international inspectors in late 2002.

Despite the claim, the State Department said there was no "crisis", and the White House said it had heard such rhetoric before. The administration has come under intense scrutiny from its domestic critics for allowing the North Korean nuclear crisis to develop with no sign of progress, while being preoccupied in Iraq where no weapons of mass destruction were found.

Members of the US Congress who traveled to Pyongyang last month, with the goal of persuading the communist leadership to return to the talks, expressed disappointment and urged patience.

They said they believed North Korea was holding out for a better offer from the US, and urged China to exert more pressure on its neighbour.

They noted that North Korea had not ruled out a return to the six-party talks and immediately dispatched a letter to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, urging him to reconsider.

"They are simply posturing," Curt Weldon, US congressman, told the FT.

Tom Lantos, US congressman, said it was a mix of bargaining and inexperience on the part of the North Korean leadership.

The US has refused to offer economic inducements to North Korea until it has completely dismantled its entire nuclear programme. A State Department spokesman on Thursday indicated the offer was not final, but he declined to say whether the US could give something to North Korea before the end of the process.

"There was so much pressure from the US and China to come to the table and resolve the nuclear issue as soon as possible, so this may be a North Korean tactic to defuse the pressure," said Jun Bong-geun of the Institute for Peace and Co-operation in Seoul. "But to say that they have weapons that's serious provocation," he said.

Some analysts said Pyongyang might have been riled by its dialogue partners' assumption that, since Mr Bush's State of the Union address passed without incident, the regime would unquestionably return to the negotiations.

Analysts in Washington also said the outburst was more rhetorical than real.

"My sense is that they are resisting these efforts or trying to raise their price tag for returning. Statements like these are very rarely a sign of a major crisis or event, it's just posturing," commented Jon Wolfsthal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.