US downplays North Korea announcement
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-29 16:37

The Bush administration responded calmly yesterday to North Korean statements it has turned the plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into nuclear weapons.

Senior administration officials said they were not abandoning the six-nation talks designed to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons program, even as they acknowledged negotiations will not resume this month despite previous North Korean commitments to do so.

They suggested North Korea might be wooed back to the table later this year after the US presidential election and after the board of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency meets in November and reviews South Korean experiments with enriched uranium and plutonium.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon disclosed Monday at the United Nations that his country had converted the spent nuclear fuel rods, saying it would serve as a deterrent to increasing US nuclear threats and to prevent a nuclear war in northeast Asia. The danger of war on the Korean peninsula "is snowballing," the North Korean diplomat warned.

"We take all their claims seriously," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, but he also suggested a touch of theater in the North Korean diplomat's statement, saying Pyongyang "is bragging about violating its commitments and its promises."

Choe told the UN General Assembly's annual ministerial meeting that Pyongyang had "no other option but to possess a nuclear deterrent" because of US policies that he said were designed to make North Korea "a target of preemptive nuclear strikes."

"Our deterrent is, in all its intents and purposes, the self-defensive means to cope with the ever increasing US nuclear threats and further, prevent a nuclear war in northeast Asia," he told a news conference after his speech.

The United States has said it has no plans to attack the communist country.

In his General Assembly speech and at the press conference with a small group of reporters, Choe accused the United States of intensifying threats to attack the communist nation and destroying the basis for negotiations to resolve the dispute over Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Nonetheless, he said, North Korea is still ready to dismantle its nuclear program if Washington abandons its "hostile policy" and is prepared to coexist peacefully.

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