N. Korea Sends Mixed Messages

BEIJING â€”  A six-nation meeting to deal with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program ended here today on a deeply contradictory note, with North Korean officials having threatened once more to test a nuclear device but all sides indicating that they planned to meet again to work toward a resolution of the crisis.

The final round of the three-day meetings ended around noon with a bizarre mix of belligerency and cooperation in the air. The North Koreans put out mixed messages through their official news agency, offering a set of proposed solutions but also accusing the United States of putting future talks in jeopardy by exhibiting a hostile attitude.

Diplomats said a joint communique was likely to be released later today. Several delegates said it would express a joint intention to meet again, though probably without a specific date. There was no immediate comment from the American delegation as the talks ended. Earlier, officials in the U.S. described them as positive.

North Korean officials announced Thursday that their country was prepared to test a nuclear weapon, dismaying their Chinese hosts and representatives of the other four nations here -- Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States -- that hope to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear programs, U.S. officials said.

At the same time, though, negotiators said North Korea had expressed a willingness to abandon its nuclear weapons program and submit to verification inspections in return for a package of aid and energy assistance, diplomatic relations and a formal guarantee that it would not come under attack. The United States has said such offers amount to unacceptable nuclear blackmail and has instead insisted that North Korea drop the program as a precondition for the help it seeks.

U.S. officials privately confirmed that the North Koreans had indicated a willingness to consider disarming if the other five parties agreed to their conditions. But if the demands are not met, the North threatens to test its nuclear weapons.

“They claim to have them, and have the means of delivering them, and are prepared to test,� one official said.

U.S. officials downplayed the North Korean posture as “nothing new,� saying the remarks were a replay of threats Pyongyang has made in the past. In April, a North Korean official told Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly that Pyongyang had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, and that it might export or test them -- or consider disarming them, depending on U.S. actions.

“We have no way of knowing,� a Bush administration official said. The talks so far have shed no light on whether North Korea means to make good on its threats or is engaged in brinkmanship aimed at extracting maximum concessions from the U.S. Either way, “it doesn’t change our policy; it doesn’t change our approach,� he said.

The real test will be whether North Korea agrees to attend a second round of talks, perhaps in October. Such an agreement would probably be hailed by all sides as a sign of progress. Negotiators involved in the talks have generally characterized them as slow but useful.

South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo Hyuck told journalists after the summit ended today that all six nations agreed to meet again, although no formal date was set. China’s Central Television said the talks would take place within two months, but there was no immediate verification of this from other countries.

In Crawford, Texas, where President Bush is vacationing at his ranch, White House Deputy Press Secretary Claire Buchan said Thursday, “The assessment from our team who was on the ground in Beijing in these discussions is that this is a positive session.�

And, she added, “we are receiving excellent cooperation from our partners.�

State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker and Buchan both declined to confirm the North Korean comments.

But another official said the North Koreans had repeated their demands for a legally binding nonaggression treaty with the United States, a normalization of diplomatic relations and compensation for the electricity North Korea had lost by shutting down a plutonium reactor under a 1992 deal, in which the North had promised to freeze all nuclear activity. North Korea’s admission last October that it had a uranium-enrichment program that violated that pledge triggered the crisis that led to the current talks in Beijing.

“If they get back all the stuff that, frankly, they threw away, then they would allow inspections and eventual dismantlement� of the nuclear program, the official said. No timetable for relinquishing the nuclear program was offered.

North Korea also has continued to drop strong hints that it wants economic aid as a condition of giving up its nuclear weapons program, negotiators involved in the talks said. That is an approach that the White House has characterized as an unacceptable attempt at nuclear blackmail.

The CIA has long believed that North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons and an active long-range missile program, but analysts have questioned whether the North has the technological prowess to miniaturize warheads enough to tip a ballistic missile with a nuclear device.

The U.S. sees no signs of any impending nuclear test, an American official said.

“They have a long-standing tradition of making threats,� he said. “Is there evidence that they’re making preparations to fire off a nuclear weapon? No.�

Covert preparations for an underground test might go undetected, the official said, but the U.S. is confident that it would detect any nuclear explosion, even underground. Two independent analysts agreed.

If the purpose of a North Korean nuclear test is to put the world on notice that Pyongyang has a nuclear deterrent -- the communist regime has claimed that it needs the weapons to defend against a hostile United States -- then the secretive North might conduct an aboveground test, said Michael Levi, a nuclear physicist at the Brookings Institution, a public policy center in Washington.

Some analysts saw as ominous North Korea’s willingness to repeat its nuclear threats in front of diplomats from five countries, including its traditional ally, China. One delegate at the talks said the Chinese hosts appeared distressed by the North Koreans’ statement during the talks. But others disputed that characterization, saying they did not detect any particular agitation in the Chinese delegation and that the remarks seemed to be treated as a reiteration of what the North Koreans had said previously.

In any event, “North Korea has repeatedly sucked the oxygen out of any diplomatic approach by removing any ambiguity about their intentions,� L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Washington-based Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs, said in an interview from South Korea.

“The more North Korea threatens [and] the more specific they make their capabilities, the higher the international community has to raise the bar for an international settlement.�

The North Korean claims will increase pressure for a highly intrusive inspection and verification regime to make sure that Pyongyang does not cheat on any future deal, Flake said.

But the U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 1997 to 2000, Stephen Bosworth, said it was not clear whether North Korea could be persuaded to agree to such inspections. “The chances are not nil, but I think it’s going to be a tough sell,� he said.

The U.S. will also have to craft an agreement reassuring Pyongyang that it will not be attacked but falling short of a treaty or a nonaggression pact, which the administration has ruled out. “Diplomacy can solve that problem,� Bosworth said.

The timing of who concedes first is likely to be thorny. The U.S. and other countries have insisted that North Korea abandon all plans for nuclear weapons in a “complete, verifiable and irreversible� manner, while the North Koreans have refused to do so unless they first get a formal guarantee that the country will not come under attack.

The exercise in diplomacy and simultaneous translation in Beijing is so intricate that most of Wednesday was given over to opening statements, and Thursday’s round at the well-guarded Diaoyutai State Guest House in western Beijing involved responses to those statements.

In Seoul, South Korea’s foreign minister, Yoon Young Kwan, told reporters neither North Korea nor the U.S. had made new proposals to break the logjam. “In a broad context, I think North Korea repeated its known positions,� Yoon said.

In Washington, which has been trying to play down expectations for what can be achieved in Beijing, “nobody was expecting some breakthrough or better behavior� by the North Korean delegation, one official said. “The breakthrough would have been if they had said something different in their initial statements.�

Nonetheless, negotiators privately said that there was no acrimony at the meeting and that North Korean officials had repeated earlier assertions that their country was willing to give up its weapons program and wanted the issue resolved peacefully. Russian officials went a bit further, saying that North Korea wanted to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are the major issue at the talks, and each of the other five nations says it wants the country to be nuclear-free. But there are other issues that could complicate the negotiations.

For instance, Japan has taken the occasion to urge North Korea to release the children of five Japanese citizens who were abducted by the North Korean government in the 1970s and 1980s in an apparent effort to give its spies false identities.

Those citizens were allowed to return to Japan last year, but their children were not permitted to accompany them. North Korea says that Japan has reneged on a promise to send the parents back, and the dispute has boxed efforts by the countries to establish diplomatic relations or set up a Japanese food-aid program for North Korea.

Some officials in Beijing seemed more pessimistic than others that an agreement could be reached, even as they said it was important to keep talking.

Alexander Losyukov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister and leader of the country’s delegation here, said progress was almost nonexistent so far.

“The sides have advanced a number of preliminary conditions which block the development of the talks,� he said, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

*

Verhovek reported from Beijing and Efron from Washington. Times staff writers Barbara Demick in Seoul, Edwin Chen in Crawford and John Hendren in Washington also contributed to this report.