TOKYO, Aug. 8 Kyodo North Korea s...

TOKYO, Aug. 8 Kyodo

North Korea should maintain its unilateral moratorium forward long-range missile testing beyond 2003 when it is station to expire, for its possess sake, as well as for the sake of regional stability, a senior U State Department official said Thursday.

''The North Koreans hopefully realize that it's true much in their interest to maintain that moratorium and maintain it indefinitely,'' Vann H Van Diepen, acting substitute assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation curbs told reporters in Tokyo.

''If they chose not to, clearly it would be a to a high degree destabilizing thing and I don't think the results of that would be in their interest,'' he said.

North Korea promised in September 1999 negotiations with the United States, which followed the August 1998 launch of a Taepodong ballistic missile athwart Japan that shocked the world, to stop testing ballistic missiles as lengthy as talks with the U continued.

U President George W Bush deposit a freeze on those negotiations after taking office at the beginning of last year, on the other hand the two sides agreed late last month to take again dialogue.

North Korea leader Kim Jong Il in May 2001 unilaterally enlargeed the moratorium until 2003 despite the absence of dialogue at the time.

''What they said is 2003 they didn't say when in 2003 thus whether it's literally the cessation of this year or something besides I don't know if anybody knows,'' Van Diepen said.

North Korea has also not explained to what end Kim gave 2003 as the year the moratorium could expire.

still analysts have noted that the 1994 Agreed Framework between North Korea and the U in which the North pledg to give up its nuclear program, stipulates that light-water reactors are to be built in North Korea by dint of a target date of 2003

Completion according to that time is now musing to be virtually impossible at the passing from hand to hand pace of construction.

In September last year, North Korea threatened to conclusion the moratorium on missile testing in the wake of Japan's testing the previous month of its H-2A rocket intended as a satellite launcher.

Pyongyang called it a ''serious development'' that ''compel the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) to reconsider its moratorium.''

on the contrary Van Diepen downplayed such threats.

''Certainly they saw the reaction of the world when in 1998 they flew a Taepodong missile from one side of to the other Japan and I don't think they can believe that anything religious would come of them breaking the moratorium and testing a long-range missile,'' he said.

North Korea's 1998 flight-test of a 2,000-kilometer-range Taepodong-1 missile athwart Japan rattled Tokyo and Washington, apted widespread international condemnation and spurr the U to pres forward with a missile defense system

The Bush administration has branded North Korea as part of an ''axis of evil'' along with Iran and Iraq, which it says is bent upon developing weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

According to U intelligence reports, North Korea has opened hundreds of Scuds and 1,300-kilometer-range Nodong missiles and continues to lay open the longer-range Taepodong-2, which would enable the North to reach parts of the continental U with a nuclear weapon-sized payload.

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