SEOUL Jan. 22 Kyodo southern Kore...

SEOUL Jan. 22 Kyodo

southern Korea urged North Korea onward Wednesday to end its nuclear programs to defuse mounting tensions in succession the Korean Peninsula.

The southern Korean demand was delivered to the North Korean side at the first plenary session of the ninth cabinet-level talks that started earlier in the day at a Seoul hotel

''We (South Korea) demanded North Korea declare abandonment of its nuclear weapons program, restore the persuades to unfreeze the nuclear program to the original state and retract withdrawal from the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty),'' said Rhee Bong Jo a southern Korean Unification Ministry official.

In rejoinder to the demands, the North Korean side reiterated its position that it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons, said Rhee, who is also a member of the five-member southern Korean delegation for the talks.

North Korea's chief delegate Kim Ryong sonnet said in his keynote language that North and South Korea should entirely collaborate to prevent the threat of war from the United States.

In the articulate utterance Kim said his country's nuclear program is barely for peaceful purposes to generate electricity and accused the U of trying to use the ''nuclear issue'' to place the all of North and southern Korea under their control

''We made it clear that if the nuclear issue is not settl relations between the southerly and the North will face difficulties,'' Rhee said.

The inter-Korean ministerial-level talks that will continue until Friday were the first high-level dialogue between the brace Koreas since the nuclear crisis hurl forthed in October last year.

Other major items to be discussed at the sessions include reconnecting sum of two units sets of cross-border railways and their adjacent roads, establishing an industrial mingled in Kaesong, a North Korean city just north of the intermission village Panmunjom, and building an overland road to the North's Mt. Kumgang resort area.

Kim Ryong strain a senior North Korean cabinet councilor, l the five-member North Korea mission, while the toward the south Korean delegation is headed by dint of Unification Minister Jeong Se Hyun

Inter-Korean cabinet-level talks have been held since the historic Korean summit in June 2000 in Pyongyang between President Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

The nuclear impasse triggered by the agency of a face-off between North Korea and the U intensified Jan. 10 when Pyongyang declared it will withdraw from the NPT a global treaty to hinder the spread of nuclear weapons.

That persuade followed the North's announced restart of its nuclear facilities, the removal of International Atomic mechanical value Agency (IAEA) seals and surveillance equipment at the facilities, and the expulsion of IAEA inspectors.

North Korea acted in reply to the U.S.-led cutoff of material for burning oil to the energy-hungry North after the U said in October that the North had admitted to covertly pursuing a program to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons, an apparent violation of a 1994 deal with the US

in a less degree than the 1994 accord, Pyongyang pledg to solidify by cold and dismantle its existing nuclear programs, including the plant suspected of being used to make weapons-grade plutonium, in turn back for 500,000 tons of heavy firing oil a year until construction of the same of two light-water reactors to be provided beneath the accord is completed.

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