US: The United States yesterday held out the threat of freezing some North Korean assets if six-party talks did not make progress in the next five days in ending the communist state's nuclear weapons capability.
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said the United States was not solely dependent on current negotiations in China to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions and listed freezing assets as one punitive option.
"We're not sitting still, you know, we're working on anti-proliferation measures that help to protect us," Dr Rice said in an interview conducted on Thursday with the New York Post, a transcript of which was released by the State Department.
"The [ US] president signed an executive order, if you remember, that freezes assets and some entities that we believe that are engaging in proliferation trade," she said.
Dr Rice added: "So we'll see, I think in the next five or so days . . . whether or not they're prepared to make a strategic choice about their nuclear weapons programmes . . . and that will show us whether we can get a deal."
President Bush signed an executive order over the summer targeting assets of companies doing business with North Korea, Iran and Syria.
The move was seen as a new tool to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Washington and others accuse Iran of developing nuclear arms. Tehran insists it aims only to produce peaceful energy.
US officials accuse Syria of stockpiling the nerve agent, sarin, and several hundred short-range ballistic missiles.
Talks on ending North Korea's nuclear programme appeared deadlocked yesterday with a standoff over Pyongyang's demand for a civilian nuclear energy programme.
Dr Rice said North Korea's demand for a light-water reactor amounted to a shifting of the goal posts. "Well, we're, you know, we're not going there," she said of the demand for a light-water reactor.
She said that North Korea was "nostalgic" for a 1994 agreement on the light-water reactors, but US negotiator Chris Hill kept telling them that deal was dead. South Korea, Japan, Russia and China are also involved in the talks in Beijing.
Under the 1994 deal, North Korea promised to freeze its nuclear weapons programmes in return for a US package estimated at $5 billion which included two light-water nuclear power reactors to generate electricity.
These reactors are considered less capable of being diverted for nuclear weapons use.
Failure to reach an accord at the Beijing talks could prompt Washington to take the issue to the UN Security Council and press for sanctions. China opposes such a move, and North Korea has said sanctions would be tantamount to war.
Washington says Pyongyang must end all nuclear programmes verifiably and irreversibly and then it can expect aid and security guarantees. Pyongyang, however, wants the aid and guarantees first.
The latest talks resumed on Tuesday, five weeks after a marathon 13-day session failed to reach a deal.
The standoff began in October 2002 when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to a secret programme to enrich uranium, used to make nuclear weapons, in violation of the 1994 agreement.
South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun on Thursday said in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly that the United States should consider normalising relations with North Korea as part of the resolution of the nuclear arms dispute.
"Any settlement that purports to be fundamental needs to embrace the normalisation of relations between the US and North Korea," he said of the nuclear negotiations.