- WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters)
- The United States said Sunday it had no plans to attack North Korea to
persuade the communist state to abandon its nuclear program, but threatened
to impose sanctions on it and block its missile shipments.
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- Both sides said they wanted a peaceful end to the crisis
but ratcheted up tensions after North Korea announced it would expel U.N.
nuclear arms inspectors and would reopen a reactor which can yield weapons-grade
plutonium.
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- Washington referred to military action at least as a
possibility and Pyongyang vowed it would not give in to U.S. pressure.
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- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that Washington
had no plans for a pre-emptive strike and could wait through months of
diplomacy.
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- "The United States has a full range of capabilities
-- political, economic, diplomatic and yes military. But we are not trying
to create a crisis atmosphere by threatening North Korea," Powell
told NBC television's Meet the Press.
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- "It is not a crisis but it is a matter of great
concern," he said of Pyongyang's nuclear program.
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- "...We are keeping all of our options open and we
are approaching this in a very deliberate way," he added. "We
are monitoring it carefully. ... We have months to watch this unfold, see
what happens."
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- The Bush administration has labeled North Korea a member
of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq.
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- U.S. officials said Saturday the United States and its
allies could impose economic sanctions and block North Korean missile shipments
as part of a broader effort to curb weapons proliferation and to deny cash-strapped
Pyongyang revenues from its arm sales.
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- They described it as a "tailored containment"
strategy.
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- "The imperialist reactionaries are seriously mistaken
if they think they would bring the Korean people to their knees with pressure,"
Pyongyang's state-owned KCNA news agency said Sunday, quoting an editorial
in the official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.
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- But the editorial added that the government was keen
to settle the crisis in a peaceful way. It did not elaborate.
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- Saturday, 10,000 people turned out in a state-sponsored
protest in Pyongyang to denounce Washington over its hard-line policy on
the North's steps to revive a nuclear program that might have already produced
one or two atomic bombs.
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- LATEST ESCALATION
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- North Korea has ordered inspectors from the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to leave, the latest escalation of a crisis
analysts say is aimed at goading Washington and its allies into giving
food and energy aid for the starving nation of 22 million.
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- The United States, keen to keep its focus on Iraq, told
North Korea it wanted a peaceful end to the crisis on the world's last
Cold War frontier, but would not negotiate under duress.
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- Pyongyang wants direct talks with Washington.
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- "This is a country in defiance of its international
obligations," said IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei in a statement,
after the watchdog agency said its inspectors would quit North Korea on
New Year's Eve. "It sets a dangerous precedent for the integrity of
the non-proliferation regime."
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- Besides the interdiction of shipments, the United Nations,
with U.S. backing, may threaten to impose sanctions if the secretive, army-backed
regime takes further steps to restart a nuclear power plant that could
be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, U.S. officials said.
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- "If they don't turn it around, this is where we're
going to end up. Nobody wants this to happen. But the North Koreans aren't
giving anybody much to work with," one official said.
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- "Our strategy is to stick together and to step up
pressure," the official added. "The North Koreans are isolating
themselves."
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- The Bush administration is pushing for the U.N. Security
Council to take up the issue by January 12.
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- South Korea, whose president and president-elect favor
the "sunshine policy" of aid and dialogue in dealing with the
North, said it would discuss strategy with the United States and Japan
in January.
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- A foreign ministry statement said Seoul would also "seek
close cooperation with China, Russia and the European Union."
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- North Korea announced Friday it was firing up a reprocessing
laboratory that could convert spent fuel into the plutonium needed for
making nuclear bombs and had begun moving fresh fuel rods to the five-megawatt
research reactor in Yongbyon, about 55 miles north of Pyongyang.
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- North Korea told the IAEA its inspectors must leave as
a 1994 agreement, under which it was given fuel oil in exchange for compliance
on non-proliferation, had broken down.
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- The United States and its allies cut off the oil after
North Korea told a visiting U.S. official in October that it had a covert
nuclear program.
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