N Korea 'sensitive' issue

2003-07-20 16:10

Seoul - British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Sunday the North Korean nuclear crisis should be handled with special sensitivity and through dialogue, saying he had no wish to "threaten" the Stalinist regime.

"What we have to do is to engage in dialogue. That dialogue should be multilateral," Blair told a joint media conference here with his South Korean counterpart Roh Moo-Hyun following their summit.

Both leaders said they had agreed that North Korea's nuclear weapons drive, a threat to regional peace, should be dismantled and the crisis resolved through peaceful means.

"This is a situation which should be handled with special sensitivity," said Blair, who added that he had no wish to "threaten or be aggressive" toward North Korea.

"But let's not be in any doubt at all. This issue does have to be dealt with."

Dialogue should begin among China, the United States and North Korea but should eventually extend to multilateral conversations involving regional partners Japan and South Korea.

"That has to be supplemented with the influence and participation of Japan and South Korea so that the whole of the region is giving a very strong message to North Korea: It is not acceptable to continue this nuclear weapons programme, it is not acceptable to continue exporting nuclear technology, proliferating it around the world," he said.

Roh expressed confidence that the stalemate would be resolved through dialogue, adding: "I think some dangers have subsided and the situation is more stable than six months ago."

The South Korean president, who met with Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Friday, has been an outspoken advocate of engagement with the communist regime.

However, he has also insisted that the Stalinist state's nuclear weapons would never be tolerated and called for Pyongyang to respond "quickly" to international calls for multilateral peace talks.

Diplomatic efforts

"We agreed that we should continue diplomatic efforts to persuade North Korea to respond quickly to multilateral talks," he said.

Asked why he supported military action against Iraq, which denied having weapons of mass destruction but advocated dialogue in dealing with North Korea which has boasted openly of its nuclear deterrent, Blair said the cases were historically different.

"There is not the history of the United Nations resolutions, the use of weapons of mass destruction that there was with Saddam (Hussein)," he said.

North Korea has ejected nuclear weapons monitors and pulled out of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty in a nine-month stand-off over its nuclear weapons drive.

Recently it claimed it had reprocessed spent nuclear fuel rods to make sufficient weapons-grade plutonium for some six nuclear bombs.

US officials have said they cannot verify that claim, though they confirm that sensors set up on North Korea's borders have begun detecting elevated levels of krypton 85, a gas emitted as spent fuel is converted into plutonium.

The 8 000 spent fuel rods were housed at North Korea's main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of the capital Pyongyang.

However, the New York Times said on Sunday that the communist regime may have built a second, secret plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium, citing US and Asian officials with access to the latest intelligence.

The newspaper said that computer analyses that track the gases as they are blown across the Korean peninsula appeared to rule out the Yongbyon reprocessing plant as their origin.

Neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor the White House would comment on the story.

Blair, who arrived here from Japan, now heads for China for the next leg of his East Asian tour.

- AFX