South Korea calls for calm

South Korea urged the United States and its allies to be calm following North Korea’s sudden declaration it is a nuclear power, reminding them that blustering and brinkmanship are nothing new in Pyongyang’s toolbox of diplomatic tactics.

Yet South Korean officials also cautioned about further steps by North Korea that could notch up the tension – such as shipping weapons materials to other countries with nuclear ambitions or even testing a bomb.

The North’s announcement and its decision to pull out of six-nation disarmament talks was “a matter of grave concern,” South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon told reporters in Washington, where he arrived on a scheduled trip to meet US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

But it is important to remember that “North Korea has shown similar attitudes in times of crucial negotiations” in the past, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted him as saying.

“We need to calmly analyse the situation,” Ban said, noting the North’s commitment to “solve the issue through dialogue and negotiations.”

North Korea shocked the world by announcing yesterday that it has nuclear weapons and will stay away from US-led six-nation nuclear disarmament talks.

“We … have manufactured nukes for self-defence to cope with the Bush administration’s ever-more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North),” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in an English statement yesterday.

In Seoul, Vice Foreign Minister Lee Tae-shik told members of the ruling Uri party that “the North’s move appears to be aimed at improving its negotiating power.”

But he warned “the problem could get very serious if North Korea takes additional actions,” according to Uri Party spokesman Lim Jong-suk.

Since the nuclear crisis erupted in late 2002, North Korea has steadily increased stakes in the standoff. It first removed UN seals on its mothballed nuclear facilities, expelled the last UN nuclear monitors, then quit the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and later said it had completed reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods to extract weapons-grade plutonium.

South Korea’s take on what experts label North Korea’s ”bombshell announcement” reflects its decades-long experience in dealing with North Korean officials, who pepper their negotiating rhetoric with shouts, threats and dire warnings of imminent clashes.

Around the region, governments voiced concern over the North’s latest hard-line manoeuvre and urged a resumption of six-nation talks aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program in return for diplomatic and economic benefits.

Since 2003, the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have held three rounds of talks in Beijing, but no significant progress has been made.

Hopes for the resumption of talks rose in recent weeks after US President George Bush began his second term without using harsh word against the Stalinist regime. But to Pyongyang, Rice’s labelling last month of it as one of the “outposts of tyranny” was insult enough to scuttle the diplomatic process.

North Korea’s knack for surprising its negotiating partners was demonstrated by the timing of its announcement, which came on the last day of the lunar New Year’s holiday and the first working day for Seoul newspapers. South Korean officials scurried to their offices to analyse and react to what local media called the “first New Year’s gift from the North.”

The main opposition Grand National Party said North Korea’s announcement illustrated intelligence failures by the current government, which has pushed for economic cooperation with Pyongyang to help foster reform.

“The government should find out the truth about North Korea, instead of talking loud with loose information,” the party said in a statement.