LITTLE ROCK — The United States, South Korea and Japan are all balking at China’s request for emergency talks with North Korea as high-profile military exercises between South Korea and the United States in the Yellow Sea continued in a show of force.
Obama administration officials said that a return to the table with North Korea, as China sought this weekend, would be rewarding Pyongyang for provocative behavior over the past week, including the North’s deadly artillery attack on a South Korean island and its disclosure of a uranium enrichment plant. Beijing called for emergency talks with North Korea, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Russia, participants in the six-party nuclear talks, which have been suspended indefinitely.
“The United States and a host of others, I don’t think, are not interested in stabilizing the region through a series of PR activities,” Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said.
He said that the talks “without an understanding and agreement from the North Koreans to both end their behavior as they exhibited last week, but also to come to the table with a seriousness of purpose on the denuclearization issue - without that seriousness of purpose, they’re just a PR activity.”
The United States wanted China to signal clearly that North Korea’s aggressive behavior would not be tolerated. Instead, Beijing remained neutral about who was responsible for the recent flare-up and offered only to provide a venue for all sides to air their differences.
Gibbs and other administration officials said that the United States also wanted to see North Korea take steps to denuclearize, what most Asia analysts said might be a tall order for Pyongyang at a time when its government is undergoing a leadership crisis.
North Korea said today that its uranium enrichment program is progressing and that it is building a light-water reactor, stressing that they are for peaceful purposes.
The North first revealed the uranium program earlier this month to a visiting U.S. scientist, claiming it had two thousand centrifuges in operation, and U.S. officials fear they could be used in a nuclear weapons program.
The North’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in commentary that the program is for peaceful purposes only. The commentary was carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
North Korea has been pushing for renewed international talks on receiving much-needed aid in return for commitments to dismantle its nuclear programs.
South Korea and Japan are also clearly skeptical of whether the consultations, as suggested by the Chinese, are worth a try. President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan on Monday both denounced what they called North Korea’s brutality.
Lee pointedly said nothing about the Chinese proposal; analysts in Seoul described it as disappointingly familiar. A spokesman for the Japanese prime minister said that while Japan is cautiously reviewing China’s offer, talks hinge on whether North Korea changes it behavior.
It remains unclear just what the United States would actually accept from North Korea to return to talks. One Obama administration official said that the United States wanted a clear sign that the North “will stop provocative behavior.”
“We’re trying to get out of this cycle where they act up and we talk,” the official said.
He spoke on grounds of anonymity under diplomatic rules.
Separately, South Korea’s military appeared to step back from one confrontational stance, canceling live-fire artillery drills on the island in the Yellow Sea attacked by North Korea a week ago.
While the military exercises continued, the prospect of the South Korean live-fire drills - scheduled for today but canceled within four hours of the announcement - had been sharpening tensions after the North’s artillery attack last week on a garrison island that is also home to about 1,350 civilians, mainly fishermen. The attack killed two South Korean marines and two civilians, and wounded 18 people.
The United States announced the date of the joint exercises as an immediate response. China - which the United States, South Korea and other countries hoped would act to calm the North - has so far focused more publicly on warning the United States not to operate in waters it claims as a sovereign zone.
At the United Nations, the Obama administration called for tighter enforcement of sanctions against North Korea. The Security Council met Monday to discuss the crisis but did not emerge with any new plans for what to do next, further reflecting the mounting frustration in the international community over how to rein in North Korea.
Information for this article was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times and by Hyung-jin Kim and Foster Klug of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 11/30/2010