North Korea Criticizes Military Exercise

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday that annual American-South Korean military exercises that began over the weekend could further delay progress on ending the North’s nuclear weapons programs.

Although such criticism from the Communist country is routine, it dampened hopes for warmer ties between the United States and North Korea — hopes that had been raised after the New York Philharmonic’s concert last week in the North Korean capital., Pyongyang.

News also emerged from Pyongyang over the weekend that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, who did not attend the Philharmonic’s concert, paid a rare visit to the Chinese Embassy on Saturday for “cordial talks” — a move that suggested that Mr. Kim was striking a delicate diplomatic balance between the big powers.

The military exercise, which involves tens of thousands of United States and South Korean troops and the Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was “an exercise for invasion to trigger a nuclear war,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

“This nuclear threat won’t work with us, but will only put the brakes on the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula,” the unnamed spokesman was quoted as saying.

He said North Korea would “further bolster all its deterrent forces,” a term the country often uses to refer to its nuclear arsenal.

The United States and South Korea have been staging annual joint war games for years, and each year North Korea criticizes them.

This year’s weeklong drill, which started Sunday, comes at a delicate time for North Korea.

Frustration in Washington is rising over North Korea’s delays in giving a full accounting of its nuclear programs. In Seoul, Lee Myung-bak, a conservative politician who has championed a tougher stance toward the North, was sworn in as president on Feb. 25.

On Sunday, a North Korean military official was quoted by the official news media as saying that the country was ready to strike back against the military exercises, using “all our means we have prepared at a high cost.”

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the top American negotiator on North Korea, flew to Beijing on Saturday and met with Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei of China to discuss how to restart the stalled nuclear disarmament talks with Pyongyang. But he was stood up by North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan.

Still, Mr. Hill held out hope for resuming the so-called six-party talks, which involve North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. “Time is short so I hope we can get on with that this month,” Mr. Hill, who is on a 16-day trip to Asia, said Monday at a news conference in Hanoi, Reuters reported.

The disarmament talks are bogged down over Pyongyang’s failure to meet the agreed-upon deadline of Dec. 31 to make a complete declaration of its nuclear programs.

Analysts say the main sticking point is North Korea’s reluctance to state whether it tried to enrich uranium or to transfer nuclear technology to Syria.