China, US confident in Korean nuke talk
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-10-01 14:13

China and the United States expressed confidence that six-nation talks aimed at convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear program would succeed, despite missing a September target for holding a new round of meetings.

Chinese Foreign Li Zhaoxing and his US counterpart, Secretary of State Colin Powell, said diplomacy should concentrate on bringing the isolate North back to the negotiating table.

``I think it will work,'' Powell said. ``I think that the six-party framework is what we should be concentrating on, and not any other means of dealing with this right now.''

Li said the ``entire international community'' agrees that the six-nation approach is the best way to deal with the problem.

Besides the United States and North Korea, other participants are China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. The United States wants the North to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs and allow outside monitoring.

The third round of talks ended in June with no progress toward a settlement but a promise to meet again by the end of September.

North Korea said it could not attend the proposed new round because of hostile US policies and recently disclosed secret experiments by South Korean scientists involving enriched uranium. The Bush administration said the experiments were of an academic nature and were inconsequential.

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