North Korea appeals to South to resist US

NORTH KOREA yesterday said South Korea should join it in resisting US moves toward war, another angry pronouncement days before highly sensitive talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

North Korea has repeatedly accused the US of planning to attack it after the Iraq war, which Washington denies. The North’s intention in making the statement wasn’t clear, but it has often tried to drive a wedge between South Korea and its chief ally, the US.

North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper said all Koreans “should firmly unite as one to resolutely smash the US moves for a war of aggression in order to protect the destiny of the nation and the future of a reunified country.”

“The whole nation should resist the US war moves in a do-or-die spirit,” the newspaper said, according to the KCNA news agency, the North’s foreign news outlet. The call came before US-North Korean talks in China this week on the communist North’s suspected nuclear weapons programme. US and South Korean officials had been encouraged that the North agreed to the talks, but KCNA, in an English-language statement over the weekend that obscured Pyongyang’s intentions, said North Korea was “successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase.”

It was unclear if the work had actually begun or the translation was faulty. US and South Korean officials said there is no proof that reprocessing was underway, and suggested the report may have been a mistranslation of the vaguely worded Korean version.

Washington believes North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs and can extract enough plutonium from the fuel rods to make several more within months. North Korea has never admitted or denied having nuclear bombs, but has said it has the right to develop such weapons.