North Korea Says Nuclear Pact With U.S. Has Fallen Apart

North Korea said Thursday that a 1994 nuclear agreement with the United States has collapsed because of the U.S.-led decision to suspend fuel oil deliveries to the communist country.

But in a vaguely worded statement, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry appeared to leave open the possibility that the deal might be salvaged.

It said an earlier appeal for a nonaggression pact with the United States was aimed at preventing the nuclear agreement from being derailed.

It said such a pact was the only “realistic solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula” and did not say it had plans to restart a suspected nuclear arms program frozen under the 1994 deal.

Last week, the United States and its allies -- South Korea, Japan and the European Union -- suspended deliveries of fuel oil to the energy-starved North to punish it for violating the 1994 pact by embarking on a second nuclear weapons program.

The oil deliveries are part of the pact known as the Agreed Framework that required a U.S.-led consortium to build two modern nuclear reactors in North Korea. In exchange, the North agreed to dismantle its suspected plutonium weapons program.

Despite recent revelations that the North has a second nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium, an unidentified North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said the blame for the erosion of the Agreed Framework lay with the United States.

In Washington, a senior State Department official declined to comment but noted that North Korean officials took a similar position when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly visited Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, last month.

After his trip, Kelly said that North Korean officials told him they considered the 1994 agreement dead and that they had admitted to the second nuclear program.

The North has offered to resolve U.S. security concerns if Washington signs a nonaggression treaty with it. But the United States has ruled out any talks unless the North first scraps its uranium-based nuclear program.