SOUTH KOREA: South Korea began an intensive diplomatic effort yesterday to try to avert a nuclear stand-off between neighbouring North Korea and the US.
Anxious about the increasingly bellicose noises from Pyongyang and the growing calls in Washington for punitive measures, it has asked China and Russia to step in.
Ministers said South Korea could not afford to sit back and let the US, its closest ally, to take the lead, as it did in the 1994 crisis.
"We will mobilise all diplomatic means available to seek an early solution to the nuclear issue because it is directly related with our security and economy," the foreign minister, Mr Choi Sung-hong, said.
At his ranch in Texas, President George Bush said that US was "working with allies in the region to explain to North Korea \ it is not in their interest to proliferate weapons of mass destruction".
He said the crisis was a diplomatic, not a military, issue, and he believed it would be resolved peacefully. But he added: "We've got a great heart. But I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks . . . one of the reasons why the people are starving is because the leader of North Korea hasn't seen to it that their economy is strong or that they be fed.
Seoul watched in alarm as North Korea threw out inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and began to reactivate the moth-balled nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, which can produce weapons-grade plutonium.
The deputy foreign minister, Mr Lee Tae-shik, went to Beijing yesterday and called on China to use its influence with North Korea.
He told his Chinese counterpart that the North should take the first step towards defusing the crisis by replacing the UN monitoring cameras and seals on equipment in Yongbyon and closing down the uranium enrichment programme. China's response was not made public, but it has previously called for the Korean peninsula to be nuclear-free.
Tomorrow South Korea will widen its diplomatic net by sending an envoy to Moscow to see President Vladimir Putin. "We will ask strongly for the Russian government to take an active role in contacts with North Korea to persuade it to come to the table for negotiations that will secure a peaceful resolution of the current situation," an official said.
Its efforts are timed to dissuade the US from increasing the tension by imposing economic sanctions or other punitive measures at meetings next week.
On Monday the IAEA will convene an emergency meeting of its 35 board members to condemn North Korea's actions, but it is expected to stop short of seeking a confrontational UN security council resolution.
On Tuesday the US, Japan, and South Korea meet to discuss the aid agreement under which North Korea originally closed the Yongbyon plant.