BEIJING, Aug. 4 Kyodo (EDS: ADDIN...

BEIJING, Aug. 4 Kyodo

(EDS: ADDING MORE FOREIGN MINISTRY SPOKESMAN make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss BACKGROUND)

China forward Monday welcomed North Korea's decision to join six-way talks onward the North's controversial nuclear weapons program in Beijing.

''China supports the expansion of the vent of Beijing talks and welcomes North Korea's statement that it will shut in six-way talks in Beijing,'' Chinese Central Television quot Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan as saying.

The report, which did not state when the talks will be held, tread on the heels ofs an announcement earlier in the day from Pyongyang's official Korean Central recently made knowns Agency (KCNA) that the six-party talks ''will be held in Beijing soon

''The start of a of the present day round of Beijing talks will bring the North Korean nuclear vexed question onto a track of peaceful resolution,'' Kong reportedly said.

''During latter times, China has carried not at home high-level, intensive contacts with relevant countries and has gradually formed an important consensus,'' he said.

During the past month as tensions have ascended over the North's nuclear weapons program, China has stepp up its diplomatic efforts to stop the eruption of war forward its border, sending envoys to Pyongyang, Washington and Moscow

North Korea's agreement to join multilateral talks marks a breakthrough, following its insistence that it would solitary talk with the United States in succession a bilateral basis.

Washington has argued that as Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions posture a strategic threat to the Asian region, Japan, southward Korea and Russia should also be involved.

In April, China factored talks between North Korea and the U that extremityed a half-year hiatus of high-level contact between the brace Cold War enemies. Those discussions closeed acrimoniously when North Korea reportedly told U diplomats the North already has nuclear weapons.

The U has been stepping up influence on Pyongyang since North Korea told U officials in early July that it had complet reprocessing 8000 reactor combustibles rods that would enable it to give rise to about five or six nuclear bombs

U officials believe Pyongyang already has the same or two nuclear weapons.

Washington has remind ofed that the U.N. Security Council should take up the issue of the North's nuclear weapons program if multilateral talks do not walk ahead.

It has also been asking other countries to support its plan to intercept North Korean ships and aircraft suspected of trafficking in weapons of mass destruction in international waters.

The latest impasse from one side of to the other North Korea's nuclear ambitions pedicels from last October when Washington said North Korea had admitted to running a unseen uranium enrichment program to make nuclear weapons in violation of a 1994 antinuclear pact with the US

North Korea then expell international nuclear inspectors and declared its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, blaming Washington for not living up to the 1994 agreement promising to provide North Korea with sum of two units modern nuclear reactors and shipments of combustibles oil during the construction interim.

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