South Tries To Ease Korea Nuke Stress

South Korea's president-elect will soon present a compromise requiring both North Korea and the United States to make concessions to resolve mounting tensions over the communist North's nuclear program, an aide said Friday.

However, in Beijing, North Korea's ambassador to China blamed the United States for the standoff, which he said could only be resolved if Washington agrees to negotiate a non-aggression treaty with Pyongyang.

China Friday said Washington's hard-line stand toward North Korea's nuclear issues has done nothing but increase tension on the Korean peninsula. CBS News Reporter Katherine Arms says an editorial in the state-run China Daily said the U.S. has escalated the situation with its threat to impose sanctions and block missile shipments, but President Bush is beginning to acknowledge that diplomacy is the only effective means in dealing with North Korea on its vow to build up military power.

On the demilitarized zone, a U.S. military commander said North Korean troops stationed there have not altered their movements since the dispute escalated.

In Seoul, Roh Moon-hyun, who won a Dec. 19 vote, hopes his proposal will resolve the dispute before he takes office on Feb. 25 and meets President Bush in Washington soon afterward.

"The president-elect plans to present his own solution around the middle of this month," said Lim Chae-jung, head of the presidential transition team, on SBS-TV.

The solution would require both Mr. Bush and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to make concessions, Lim said.

Lim declined to elaborate but said the president-elect is taking "a very cautious approach" because it is "a matter that affects the destiny of our people."

Shim Yoon-joe, head of the North American affairs department in the Foreign Ministry, said on television that North Korea should agree to scrap its nuclear weapons program as a first step toward dialogue.

"If North Korea makes its position clear on its uranium-based nuclear weapons program and announces its willingness to scrap it, that can set the stage for dialogue with the United States," Shim said on all-news cable network YTN.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that one South Korean proposal under study calls for the United States to guarantee security of North Korea "in the form of a letter or a document" in case the communist North publicly announces its intentions to gives up its nuclear weapons program.

"The starting point of any solution should be North Korea publicly stating a willingness to scrap its nuclear weapons program," Yonhap quoted a South Korean Foreign Ministry official as saying.

The official, requesting anonymity, told Yonhap that the United States' position is that it would never accept signing a treaty with North Korea that will require congressional ratification.

South Korea plans to present its proposal at trilateral consultative meetings with the United States and Japan to be held in Washington on Monday and Tuesday, Yonhap said.

The government wouldn't immediately comment on the report.

North Korea admitted to visiting U.S. diplomats in October that it had secretly pushed a new nuclear weapons program using enriched uranium. That violated a 1994 accord under which Pyongyang froze its earlier plutonium-based nuclear program in return for energy supplies.

After the United States and its allies halted oil supplies as punishment, North Korea decided in early December to reactivate the plutonium-based nuclear program. It since has removed monitoring seals and cameras from its main nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, expelled U.N. inspectors and signaled it may quit the global nuclear arms control treaty.

Roh, a former human rights lawyer, supports dialogue to resolve the dispute. He believes military force or economic sanctions could backfire and result in catastrophe.

The border between the two Koreas is the world's most heavily militarized, with more than 2 million troops massed on both sides. Millions of people were killed or injured in the 1950-53 Korean War. About 37,000 U.S. troops are currently stationed in South Korea.

Mr. Bush sharply rebuked North Korea's leader on Thursday, saying he has "no heart for somebody who starves his folks," though he said he remains confident in a peaceful solution to the nuclear standoff.

The president seems too focused on Iraq, and not enough on North Korea, to former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

"There's a difference in the president's tone of voice about Iraq than there is about any other issue, and that concerns me," he told the BBC.

"My concern has been as we seem to lurch toward a war with Iraq that other issues perhaps greater dangers will be overlooked or passed into the shadows."

One of those greater dangers, in Christopher's opinion, is North Korea.

"They're nearer to having nuclear bombs, if they don't have them, they have better delivery capability, there are no inspectors there in North Korea, so I think measured at least as far as I can tell without being able to read the daily intelligence, that's a graver threat," he said in a radio interview.

South Korea has stepped up its diplomacy and plans to use upcoming inter-Korean Cabinet-level talks to urge North Korea to stop efforts to restart its nuclear facilities.

The meetings, which are the highest channels of dialogue between the two sides, would provide the first opportunity for South Korea to directly raise the nuclear issue with the North.

No date has been set for the meetings due to be held in Seoul around mid-January.

Deputy South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Hang-kyung left for Moscow Friday to seek Russia's help. He was to meet Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov on Sunday.

Assistant South Korean Foreign Minister Lee Tae-shik returned home Friday after talks with Chinese officials in Beijing. The two countries agreed to resolve the North's nuclear issue peacefully.

"The two sides will work to prevent the situation from further aggravating," said Shin Jung-seung, director of the ministry's Asia-Pacific affairs section.

At the United Nations, diplomats said Beijing wanted to deal privately with the situation through diplomatic channels rather than bringing it to the Security Council where Chinese diplomats could wind up publicly defending Pyongyang, because of Beijing's long-standing alliance with the North.