US ready to face threat of first strike

THE United States is ready to deal with any contingencies involving North Korea, a White House spokesman said yesterday in response to new warnings

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the remarks by North Korean deputy foreign minister director Ri Pyong-gap who was quoted in Britain's Guardian newspaper as saying "preemptive attacks are not the exclusive right of the US" further isolate North Korea internationally.

But he also sought to play down their significance. "We've heard much talk from North Korea before," Mr Fleischer told reporters.

"Obviously the US is very prepared for robust plans for any contingencies. But this type of talk and the type of actions North Korea has engaged in or says it's engaging in, only hurt North Korea," he said.

North Korea on Wednesday said it was restarting the atomic plant at the heart of its suspected weapons program, the latest step in an arms crisis that began in October 2002 when Washington said North Korea was violating a 1994 accord freezing its nuclear program.

Meanwhile, Canada, one of the few nations to have diplomatic relations with North Korea, said on Wednesday it had urged Pyongyang to show restraint in an increasingly tense nuclear stand-off with the United States.

But Foreign Minister Bill Graham distanced himself from the idea of sending a Canadian delegation to the isolated Stalinist state, saying he did not want to do anything which could harm existing efforts to end the crisis.

"It's a serious problem ... we're addressing it. I've written to my North Korean (counterpart) urging restraint," Foreign Minister Bill Graham told reporters.

Since December, North Korea has expelled International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, restarted the mothballed Yongbyon complex capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium and threatened to resume missile tests.

Mr Graham played down the chances of sending a delegation to North Korea, which has in any case made clear it only wants talks with the United States.

"We're not going to do something which in our view might look good but which would have contradictory effects. I'll be consulting with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as to what would be helpful in this circumstance."

Japan also expressed concern yesterday about escalating tensions over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, urging Pyongyang to abandon its brinksmanship and scrap its suspected atomic arms programme.

"We are carefully monitoring (the situation) and analysing the report from North Korea to find out if they have actually reactivated the reactor," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

He was referring to a report by Pyongyang's official news agency suggesting a nuclear facility at the heart of North Korea's suspected arms development programme had been restarted. He called on North Korea to reinstate a freeze on its nuclear activities and dismantle new types of nuclear development.

In a statement on official Korean Central News Agency in English on Wednesday, a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry said the country was "putting the operation of its nuclear facilities for the production of electricity on a normal footing."

An unidentified South Korean official told the South's Yonhap news agency, however, that the statement was less clear in Korean and could be taken to mean poised to restart.

Wednesday's twist in the North Korean crisis came as international attention was focused on US Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the UN Security Council designed to persuade council members and the world that UN inspectors cannot disarm Iraq and that war may be the only option.

US officials said last week that American satellite surveillance had shown North Korea was moving fuel rods around the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, but added there was no sign that crucial reprocessing of those spent rods had begun a step that would enable North Korea to begin making atomic bombs in weeks.