North Korea wants unconditional nuclear talks

North Korea's top nuclear official on Wednesday called for the resumption of six-party talks on its nuclear program without preconditions, Japan's Kyodo News Agency reported from Beijing. "To truly realize the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, we need to have the six parties all together to make concerted efforts," North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan, its point man on nuclear issues, was quoted as saying in a symposium in the Chinese capital. "We hope to have unconditional talks," Kim said. China hosted the symposium aiming at building momentum for the resumption of the six-party talks on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program, which have been deadlocked since late 2008. The talks also involve the US, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. China, chair of the six-party talks, had asked other members to send senior officials to the symposium, organized by an institute affiliated with its Foreign Ministry, but none of them besides North Korea has sent their top nuclear envoy. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula, heightened in the wake of North Korea's third nuclear test in February, have eased somewhat in recent months, with Pyongyang expressing its willingness to engage in dialogue. But the US, Japan and South Korea believe that it is not yet the right time to revive the six-party talks. They share the stance that North Korea must first take concrete and credible steps toward giving up its nuclear ambitions before there can be substantive discussions on restarting the talks. The event is being held to mark the 10th anniversary of the launch of the talks and the eighth anniversary of an agreement reached therein to provide North Korea with energy assistance in exchange for it abandoning its nuclear weapons program. It comes a week after the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Institute for Science and International Security released reports that North Korea may have restarted a 5-megawatt reactor, which is capable of producing plutonium, at its main Yongbyon nuclear complex