North Korea nuclear agreement collapsed

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea said Thursday that a 1994 nuclear agreement with the United States collapsed because of the U.S.-led decision to suspend fuel oil deliveries to the communist country.\nIn a vaguely worded statement, North Korea's Foreign Ministry appeared to leave open the possibility that the deal might be salvaged. It said an earlier appeal for a nonaggression pact with the United States was aimed at preventing the nuclear agreement from being "derailed at any cost."\nIt said such a pact was the only "realistic solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula" and did not say it had any plans to restart a suspected nuclear weapons program that was frozen under the 1994 deal.\nLast week, the United States and its allies, South Korea, Japan and the European Union, suspended deliveries of fuel oil to the energy-starved North to punish it for violating the 1994 pact by embarking on a second nuclear weapons program.\nThe oil deliveries are part of the pact known as the Agreed Framework that required a U.S.-led consortium to build two modern nuclear reactors in North Korea. In exchange, the North agreed to dismantle a suspected nuclear weapons program using plutonium.\nDespite recent revelations that the North has a second nuclear program, an unidentified North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said the blame for the erosion of the Agreed Framework lay with the United States.\n"Now that the U.S. unilaterally gave up its last commitment under the framework, the (North) acknowledges that it is high time to decide upon who is to blame for the collapse of the framework," the spokesman said in a statement carried by the North's official news agency, KCNA.\nIt was the first time that North Korea had publicly said it considered the agreement to have collapsed.\nAfter visiting Pyongyang in October, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said North Korean officials told him they considered the 1994 agreement dead. At that time, he said, they admitted to the second nuclear program that uses highly enriched uranium to build bombs.\nIn recent months, North Korea had repeatedly threatened to abandon the accord, complaining about delays in the construction of the reactors. It also accused Washington of trying to undermine its political system and even invade, citing President Bush's labeling of the North as part of an "axis of evil," along with Iran and Iraq.\nThe North Korean spokesman said the U.S. assertion that the North violated the Agreed Framework "is a burglary logic of America-style superpower chauvinism that a big country may threaten a small country as it wishes but a small country should not try to cope with such threat."\nThe North has offered to resolve U.S. security concerns if Washington signs a nonaggression treaty with it. But the United States has ruled out any talks unless the North first scraps its uranium-based nuclear program.\nKoh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Dongguk University in Seoul, speculated that the North Korean statement was "a diplomatic card to pressure the United States" into negotiations.\nEarlier Thursday, China, North Korea's biggest ally, urged the two sides to salvage the Agreed Framework.