The top US diplomat on the North Korean nuclear crisis said today that the fate of six-party talks on the issue was in doubt, signaling a limit to Washington's patience.
US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill arrived in Beijing yesterday to try to find a way to entice the North back into talks on its nuclear programmes that have been stalled for nearly a year. China has hosted three inconclusive rounds of the negotiations.
"The future of talks is very much uncertain at this point," Mr Hill told reporters this morning. "We continue to have a North Korean regime that is very ambivalent about whether it wants to find a negotiated settlement to this."
North Korea said explicitly for the first time in February that it had nuclear weapons, ratcheting up the crisis that began in 2002 over what Washington said was its enrichment of uranium that could be used to make weapons.
The US point man on North Korea had arrived from Seoul and was flying on to Tokyo today to try to revive the talks, which were last held in June.
North Korea has since refused to return to the table for negotiations which include the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia, citing what it calls a "hostile" US policy, but Mr Hill said he had not yet run out of patience.
"I don't want to get into artificial deadlines. We continue to believe that this is the best way to solve this," he said, referring to the six-party process.
In Seoul, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said his government had also not given up.
"Our position is that we will give diplomatic efforts our best to create conditions for the six-party talks to restart. There is no artificially set deadline on that," he told a regular news briefing.
But both the United States and South Korea have increasingly voiced the possibility of other options.