The top U.S. envoy in South Korea warned North Korea Tuesday not to take further provocative action, saying that it could backfire against it.
"We have to ensure North Korea is deterred," U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said in a debate with a group of South Korean ruling Uri Party lawmakers. "It's important that Pyongyang understands its provocative and destabilizing actions have consequences."
Outsiders are closely watching whether North Korea would take further provocative acts after test-launching seven missiles on July 5, drawing strong U.N. condemnation.
North Korea angrily rejected the U.N. action against it as a U.S.-schemed move aimed at toppling its communist regime and threatened to take "even stronger action."
Some outside analysts believe that the North's next possible action may be a nuclear bomb test. Pyongyang declared in February in 2005 that it had nuclear weapons but has never proved it by conducting a bomb test.
Tension persists on the divided Korean Peninsula as North Korea vows not to rejoin stalled six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons program unless Washington lifts financial sanctions imposed over its counterfeiting of U.S. dollars and other black-marketing activities.
The U.S. refuses to back down, saying that its financial sanctions are unrelated to the stalled nuclear talks, in which the U.S., the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have been involved.
North Korea is asking the U.S. to hold direct talks with it but Washington maintains that bilateral talks are possible only within the framework of the six-nation forum.
In Tuesday's discussion in Seoul, Vershbow reconfirmed his earlier remarks that the U.S. is willing to hold bilateral talks with North Korea if the communist country agrees to return to the nuclear negotiating table.
The top U.S. nuclear envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, can make a trip to North Korea if Pyongyang Korea changes its hard-line course and rejoin the nuclear negotiations, he said.
"Assistant Secretary Hill is open to bilateral meetings with his North Korean counterpart if Pyongyang commits to return to the six-party talks," Vershbow said.
Earlier this year, North Korea invited Hill to visit Pyongyang but the U.S. envoy turned it down after Pyongyang refused to suspend the operation of its main nuclear complex at Youngbyon as a confidence-building gesture.
The nuclear tension erupted in 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea had confirmed that it had a secret uranium-enriching weapons program, in addition to its known plutonium-based one.
North Korea denied making the confession. North Korea subsequently expelled U.N. nuclear monitors and quit the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Seoul, Sept. 26 (Yonhap News)
Hill open for bilateral talks with N. Korea: U.S. ambassador |
