United States and South Korean envoys on Thursday held talks with China aimed at coaxing North Korea back into six-party nuclear talks as the CIA said the Stalinist regime could restart long-range missile testing.
The newly appointed US diplomat to multinational talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis, Christopher Hill, and South Korea’s chief negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-Soon, both arrived from Seoul.
The visits come one week after North Korea declared publicly that it possesses nuclear weapons and was suspending participation in the talks.
In Washington, the CIA said the unpredictable state could resume missile tests soon and has active biological and chemical weapons programmes.
”North Korea could resume flight testing at any time … including longer-range missiles capable of reaching the United States,” CIA Director Porter Goss testified at a Senate intelligence committee hearing in Washington.
”We believe North Korea has active CW [chemical weapons] and BW [biological weapons] programmes … ready for use.”
Goss did not say whether North Korea’s nuclear technology would allow it to launch a nuclear-tipped missile.
In 1998, North Korea launched a long-range ballistic test missile over key US ally Japan, prompting Japan to begin researching missile defence.
In a phone conversation with Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing, Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura on Wednesday made it clear that Tokyo will not tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea.
The discussions in Beijing precede an expected weekend visit to the North by a special envoy from China, the broker and host of the six-nation talks and North Korea’s closest ally.
”The point of his visit was to get to know his counterparts and get the six-party talks process moving forward,” the US embassy said of Hill’s talks with China’s point man on North Korea, Wu Dawei, and Foreign Minister Li.
Hill and Song did not meet formally and there were no trilateral talks, the embassy said.
The US, Japan and South Korea — who along with Russia, China and North Korea are the participants in the six-nation talks — believe Beijing’s influence over Pyongyang is vital to bringing it back to the negotiating table.
China is dispatching Wang Jiarui, the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s international liaison department, to Pyongyang ”this week”, the foreign ministry said. It is widely believed he will leave on Saturday.
The ministry refused to comment on Thursday on the North’s announcement that it is nuclear-armed, but called for patience and reiterated that China favours a nuclear-weapons-free Korean peninsula.
”Our position in this regard is consistent,” said spokesperson Kong Quan.
The flurry of diplomacy follows telephone discussions between most of the key players, including the foreign ministers of Russia and North Korea.
Both sides on Wednesday ”spoke out in favor of a rapid resumption of the six-way negotiating process”, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.
Japan’s Machimura spoke on Thursday with his South Korean counterpart, Ban Ki-Moon, as part of efforts to restart the talks.
Machimura and Ban said they will try to find a date late next week for the US, Japanese and South Korean negotiators to meet in Seoul, the Japanese foreign ministry said.
Machimura heads to Washington for talks on Saturday with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on North Korea and other issues.
The last round of six-party talks was in Beijing in June last year. North Korea shunned a fourth round set for last September, complaining of ”hostile” US policies.
The US and North Korea have been locked in a stand-off since October 2002 when Washington accused Pyongyang of operating a secret programme based on highly enriched uranium, violating a 1994 arms-control agreement.
North Korea denied the allegations. However, it responded by expelling United Nations nuclear inspectors, restarting a mothballed nuclear reactor and extracting weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel rods. — Sapa-AFP