China offers revised disarmament proposal
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-16 18:47

Beijing has urged the negotiators to seek a compromise and to consider all "reasonable concerns" of any country at the talks.

South Korea and Japan are also part of the nuclear negotiations.

In New York, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said any comprehensive settlement of the nuclear standoff would have to include normalization of relations between North Korea and the United States.

Roh, who is attending a U.N. summit, said he was optimistic the crisis could be resolved but that it still makes him nervous.

"Every time I think about the North Korean nuclear weapons issue, I always pray to God," he said. "I ask you to do the same."

The North and South have continued reconciliation efforts while remaining technically at war. On Friday at high-level talks between the two sides in Pyongyang, the Koreas pledged to work to ensure peace and reduce military tensions on the divided peninsula.

Citing unidentified sources, Kyodo also reported that North Korea told other nations at the negotiations that it would boost its production of nuclear material if its demand for such a reactor isn't met.

"The basic stumbling block has to do with the issue of providing a light-water reactor," North Korean spokesman Hyun Hak Bong said Thursday in the first comment from the delegation since the talks resumed.

The United States has said supplying the North with a reactor is out of the question, given the cost and the communist nation's history of deceit in its pursuit of nuclear technology to build weapons.

The North was promised two such reactors under a 1994 deal that fell apart in late 2002 after the latest nuclear crisis erupted. Light-water reactors are less easily diverted for weapons use.

"This is a problem related to the United States' political will to get rid of its hostile policy toward us and peacefully coexist," Hyun said.

But the North Korean spokesman added his government still hoped to "solve the nuclear issue peacefully through dialogue."

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