U.S. to seek 6-way talks despite N. Korea's threat to cut ties

By Hwang Doo-hyong

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (Yonhap) -- The United States Friday reiterated its pledge to denuclearize North Korea through multilateral talks, dismissing as rhetoric North Korea's threat earlier in the day to cut off all political and military accords
with South Korea.

"Let me just say this type of, you know, rhetoric is distinctly not helpful,"
State Department spokesman Robert Wood said in a daily news briefing. "But that's
not going to deter us from continuing our efforts to achieve denuclearization of
the Korean Peninsula through the six-party framework. So again, I would just say
that those comments are certainly not helpful."
North Korea earlier in the day threatened to nullify all the political and
military agreements it has forged with South Korea over the past decades, citing
what it called the hostile policy of South Korea's hardline Lee Myung-bak
government.
The North also said it will no longer honor the western sea border with South
Korea, upping tensions on the maritime border in the Yellow Sea, where naval
clashes in 1999 and 2002 killed scores of soldiers on both sides.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak appears not to be impressed, telling a
television program later in the day that he expected inter-Korean relations "will
improve before too long" and urging the North to understand that South Korea is
the nation that cares the most about the North.
Lee, however, fell short of saying he will send a special envoy to North Korea
immediately to mend ties that have been undermined severely since his
inauguration in February last year.
Lee has pledged not to seek further inter-Korean cooperation unless North Korea
abandons its nuclear ambitions, and he discontinued the hundreds of thousands of
tons of annual food and fertilizer aid that was given to the North annually under
his two liberal predecessors.
The North's repeated hostile rhetoric has been seen as a gesture targeted at the
two-week-old U.S. administration of Barack Obama, which appears to be focusing on
the economic crisis and the Middle East, including the conflict in the Gaza
Strip, sidelining the North Korean nuclear issue.
Wood said North Korea is "a priority for us, and we're committed to that goal of
denuclearization, and we're going to work with our allies in the region and
others to try to bring about that denuclearization that we all want to see
happen."
The spokesman said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "will certainly be
consulting with regional officials about the situation with regard to North
Korea."
Wood, however, would not say if the Obama administration will name a special
envoy for the North Korean nuclear issue.
Obama named former Sen. George Mitchell as the U.S. special envoy to the Middle
East immediately after the Senate last week approved Clinton as the top U.S.
diplomat, so that Mitchell could fly to the Middle East to try to broker a peace
between Israel and Hamas.
"Well, look, with regard to -- our policy with regard to North Korea is, as I've
said many times, under review," Wood said. "So the questions about whether we
will nominate an envoy or not -- that will have to come out of the review
process."
The spokesman would not speculate on the intent of the North's rhetoric.
"It's hard to say what the motivation is on the part of North Korea," he said.
"We've seen this happen before, where you'll have this hostile rhetoric coming
out of Pyongyang. Very hard to say what's at work here."
Wood was referring to the North's repeated threats made in recent weeks in time
with Obama's inauguration, including one a couple of weeks ago when a uniformed
North Korean military spokesman made a rare television appearance to threaten to
take "an all-out confrontational posture" against the South.
"Because, you know, time is of the essence, we want to deal with this issue,"
Wood said. "And again, in many ways, the North knows what the international
community requires of it with regard to the six-party framework, and that
verification protocol we'd like to see happen."
The latest round of the six-party talks involving the two Koreas, the U.S.,
China, Japan and Russia stalled last month when Pyongyang would not agree to a
procedure for verifying operation of its nuclear facilities, including taking
samples from its main nuclear reactor.
Obama and Clinton have said they will continue the six-party talks while seeking
a more direct bilateral engagement with the reclusive communist state, which
detonated its first nuclear device in 2006 and held a few test launches of
ballistic missiles that could theoretically reach the western part of the
mainland U.S.