N. Korea Demands Disarmament Talks

North Korea said Thursday that the United States should dismantle all potential nuclear threats in the region before it would discuss giving up its own nuclear program, and it demanded to be treated equally in disarmament talks.

“Now that we have become a nuclear power, the six-party talks should be disarmament talks where participants can solve the issue on an equal basis,” a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The unidentified spokesman said the nuclear crisis could no longer be resolved through discussions on a potential reward in return for freezing the nuclear program.

“To realize a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula ... U.S. nuclear threats on the Korean Peninsula and its neighboring region should be removed,” the spokesman said.

The United States has said it has removed its nuclear arsenal from the Korean Peninsula, and it was not clear what the spokesman meant.

The international talks, also involving South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, have been stalled since June.

Washington has said it will offer security guarantees and other economic and diplomatic benefits to the North, but only after it completely and verifiably dismantles its atomic weapons program.

A North Korean official said in a report published today that the regime in Pyongyang, the capital, also wanted a U.S. apology for being labeled an “outpost of tyranny” before it returned to the talks.

The “outpost of tyranny” comment was made by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearings. On a trip to the region last month, she pointedly called the North a “sovereign” country, which many saw as an attempt to soften her earlier remark.

However, Han Song Ryol, deputy chief of the North’s mission to the United Nations, told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency that Rice’s recent comment “cannot be taken as being equivalent to an apology.”