Sanctionhit North Korea vows revenge against US
SQUEEZE IS ON Pyongyang threatens to retaliate ‘thousands of times over’
A Southeast Asian diplomatic meeting quietly turned into the first real multiparty bargaining session in eight years to tackle North Korea’s nuclear programme, as the country’s top diplomat held a rare round of talks with his counterparts from China, South Korea and Russia.
The US and Japan were the only members of the so-called sixparty talks on the North’s nuclear ambitions, which ended in failure in 2009, whose diplomats did not meet this week with foreign minister Ri Yong-ho of North Korea.
But Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, kept the door open for talks, saying at a news conference on Monday that he had no specific preconditions for negotiating with Pyongyang. “The best signal that North Korea could give us that they are prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” Tillerson said.
But when asked how long such a pause would have to last before talks could go forward, Tillerson said: “We’ll know it when we see it...We are not going to give someone a specific number of days or weeks. This is really about the spirit of these talks.”
On Monday, the North threatened to retaliate “thousands of times over” against the US for the latest United Nations sanctions, calling them a “violent infringement” on its sovereignty that only deepened its resolve to strengthen its nuclear arsenal.
It said the US and “other countries as large” had reacted with “fear” to just two North Korean tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles. That made Pyongyang “more determined that this is the only way we can survive, the only path we can take,” the statement said in a statement.