Norks Demand Talks with the US
SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea has demanded bilateral talks with the United States to defuse the tension created by its announcement that it is a nuclear power, the communist state’s U.N. envoy said in a South Korean newspaper interview published Friday.
Han Sung Ryol, a senior diplomat at North Korea’s U.N. delegation in New York, was the first North Korean official to speak to outside news media since Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry defied the United States and its allies by declaring Thursday that it has nuclear weapons, its first public announcement that it has weapons.
North Korea said the weapons are a deterrent against a U.S. invasion and that it doesn’t intend to join six-nation disarmament talks any time soon.
“We will return to the six-nation talks when we see a reason to do so and the conditions are ripe,” Han told Seoul’s Hankyoreh newspaper in a Thursday interview in New York. “If the United States moves to have direct dialogue with us, we can take that as a signal that the United States is changing its hostile policy toward us.”
I really think the only time President Bush will conduct bi-lateral negotiations with Kim Jong Il is when he is bombing them. Where is the UN in all of this? They were quick to run to Iraq and stick their nose into everything. Where are they now?
