Six-party talks only possible if N. Korea accepts preconditions

North Korea must accept preconditions, including a shutdown of its uranium enrichment program, before resumption of the stalled six-nation talks on the North's nuclear weapons programs can take place, Seoul's top presidential aide said Friday. "The six-party talks will come back to life only if North Korea shows its sincerity by taking the required pre-steps, including a monitored shutdown of its uranium enrichment program," Chun Yung-woo, senior secretary to President Lee Myung-bak for foreign affairs and national security, told a security forum in Seoul. "North Korea claims that the six-party talks should be resumed without preconditions," Chun said. "As a matter of principle, we have no intention to reward North Korea for its illegal nuclear activities." At the heart of the problem in persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambition lies "the myth" embraced by the North's leadership that "they can find salvation in nuclear weapons," he said. "North Korea should realize that there is no salvation in their nuclear capabilities," Chun said. "They have a better chance of finding salvation in denuclearization." The six-party talks, dormant since April 2009, are aimed at providing economic aid and diplomatic recognition to North Korea in exchange for scrapping its nuclear programs. A month after the end of the talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan, the Pyongyang regime conducted its second nuclear test. After sharply raising tensions last year by waging two military attacks on South Korea, North Korea has called for a resumption of the six-party talks without preconditions. Seoul and Washington have insisted that Pyongyang halt all nuclear activities and allow U.N. inspectors to monitor the suspension as preconditions to reopening the six-party talks. Since July this year, South Korea and the U.S. have been engaged with North Korea for preliminary discussions to gauge the possibility of resuming the multilateral forum, but little progress has been reported. North Korea revealed last November the existence of a uranium enrichment facility, which could give Pyongyang a new source of fission material to make atomic bombs, in addition to its widely known plutonium-based nuclear weapons program. This week, Pyongyang again rejected the preconditions set by Seoul and Washington, dimming the prospects of resuming the six-party talks. "The U.S. is creating the wrong impression that there are things which the (North) has to do first for the resumption of the talks," the North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a commentary on Tuesday. "The U.S. talk about preconditions is little short of artifice to shift the blame for the failure to resume the six-party talks on" to North Korea, the KCNA said. In March last year, North Korea torpedoed the South's Cheonan warship and, later that year, shelled the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, killing a total of 50 South Koreans, mostly soldiers. Inter-Korean relations remain deadlocked as North Korea refuses to apologize for the attacks, but South Korea has allowed civic groups to offer humanitarian aid to the North. Chun hinted that Seoul may expand its humanitarian assistance for Pyongyang. "The assistance to the vulnerable in North Korea was treated as an exception when we enacted sweeping sanctions in the aftermath of the attack on the Cheonan," the presidential aide said. "Our policy is to see the North Korean people as distinct from their leadership," Chun said. "If North Korea is serious about resolving the humanitarian problems, including reunions of separated families, the humanitarian track has a reasonable chance of moving forward.