- South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung rejected US policy
on North Korea, saying pressure and isolation were doomed to failure as
the nuclear crisis deepened.
-
- Kim, who is to step down in February, said his engagement
policy was the only "effective" way to avert a showdown over
the Stalinist country's nuclear weapons ambitions.
-
- "Pressuring and isolating communist countries have
never been successful -- Cuba is one example," Kim told a cabinet
meeting.
-
- "But inducing such countries to open up through
dialogue has always been successful.
-
- "We cannot go to war with North Korea. We can't
go back to the Cold War system and extreme confrontation," he said
in a statement released through aides.
-
- Washington has been pushing to isolate North Korea and
refusing dialogue with the regime until it first agrees to dismantle its
nuclear weapons program.
-
- Though Washington says it has no plans for a military
strike, North Korea in its latest move again raised the stakes by saying
it could pull out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
-
- North Korea has pushed nuclear brinkmanship to the edge
by ordering International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to leave Yongbyon
by Tuesday, after eight years of monitoring.
-
- In a statement late Sunday, North Korea's foreign ministry
blamed the United States for the collapse of a 1994 accord under which
Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program and to stay within the NPT.
-
- The 1994 Agreed Framework (AF) helped North Korea find
itself "in a special status" where its withdrawal from the NPT
was suspended until the construction of light-water nuclear reactors by
a US-led consortium, it said.
-
- "And the US began ditching even the AF, thus putting
this special status of ours in peril," the statement said.
-
- North Korea announced its withdrawal from the NPT in
March 1993, triggering a nuclear crisis that brought the Korean peninsula
to the brink of war.
-
- Three months later the Stalinist country suspended its
threatened withdrawal after the United States agreed to start dialogue
on improving ties with North Korea.
-
- "We have been left with no option but to consider
self-defensive means to cope with the threat in order to protect the nation's
dignity and right to existence," the statement said.
-
- Pyongyang, however, left open the door for dialogue with
Washington to end a showdown over the country's renewed nuclear plans.
-
- In Washington, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said
the United States had no plan to strike North Korea, which is still technically
at war with South Korea after the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in stalemate.
-
- "Military action is never off the table in the sense
that it is not an option," Powell told CBS television. "We just
don't think the circumstances at this time require us to point a gun at
someone's head."
-
- But he said President George W. Bush "always has
every option."
-
- The nuclear crisis dragged South Korea's stock index
down 4.5 percent Monday to 627.55. Fears over a US-North Korea showdown
and US-Iraq tensions also pulled share prices down in other Asian countries.
-
- The 1994 deal has fallen apart since US revelations in
October that North Korea is running a weapons program based on enriched
uranium technology.
-
- The energy-poor country said on December 12 it is restarting
a five-megawatt facility at Yongbyon because it needs electricity after
the United States cut off fuel shipments last month.
-
- It has disabled UN monitoring equipment, removed seals
from nuclear facilities frozen under the 1994 accord, and moved fresh nuclear
fuel rods to the research reactor, which is said to be capable of producing
plutonium.
-
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