The United States will decide soon on North Korea's offer of bilateral talks, South Korea's top nuclear envoy said Wednesday, as an impatient Pyongyang escalated threats to push Washington to accept its demand.
North Korea said Tuesday it had finished reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, which experts say would provide enough weapons-grade plutonium for at least one more nuclear bomb. The North is believed to have enough weaponized plutonium for half a dozen nuclear weapons already.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly criticized the move as a violation of the North's own commitments and U.N. resolutions. The spokesman said, however, that the U.S. remains willing to hold direct talks with the North, and will make a decision.
"It's just that ... we have not decided on when and where we will have these bilateral talks," Kelly told reporters in Washington.
Seoul's lead nuclear negotiator, Wi Sung-lac, also said he believes a U.S. decision will be made soon.
"It has been a long time since North Korea has invited the U.S. (for bilateral talks). It is time for the U.S. to set its position," Wi said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency video news. "What I was told most recently is that the U.S. will soon make a decision, but I don't know about the results yet."
Wi told The Associated Press he is preparing to travel to Washington for talks with U.S. officials.
North Korea has been pushing for direct nuclear negotiations with the U.S., believing that it is the easiest, fastest and surefire way of ensuring the survival of the totalitarian regime and win economic concessions to rebuild its moribund economy.
On Monday, North Korea's Foreign Ministry warned that "if the U.S. is not ready to sit at a negotiating table with the (North), it will go its own way," an apparent threat to bolster its nuclear arsenal.
Pyongyang has claimed it needs atomic weapons to defend itself against the U.S., which fought against the North during the Korean War in the 1950s and has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea to protect the ally.
The U.S. says it has no intention of attacking the North.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak stressed that there should be no repetition of past negotiating patterns in which North Korea agreed to disarmament pacts only to backtrack on them after collecting on political and economic concessions.
"Now we are all back to square one" after North Korea's May nuclear test, Lee said at a business conference in Seoul. "I do not believe that we will be able to fundamentally resolve this issue in the next 10 or even 20 years" if the past negotiating patterns are repeated.
North Korea agreed in 2007 to disable its main nuclear facility in Yongbyon _ a step toward its ultimate dismantlement _ in exchange for much-needed energy aid and political concessions. However, Pyongyang halted that process more than a year ago and later abandoned the pact amid international censure for a series of nuclear and missile tests.
The North restarted the nuclear facilities in April in retaliation for a U.N. rebuke of a rocket launch widely criticized as an illicit test of its long-range missile technology. The country also kicked out international nuclear monitors.
The North then conducted an underground nuclear test and later launched a series of banned ballistic missile tests, prompting the U.N. Security Council to toughen sanctions against the regime.
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Associated Press writers Kelly Olsen and Kwang-tae Kim contributed to this report.
