South Korean President Kim Dae-jung has said that halting fuel aid to sanction North Korea for its broken nuclear arms promises would only exacerbate the standoff, Seoul newspapers said today.
Mr Kim's warning that sanctions may backfire was issued on a stopover in Seattle on his way home to Seoul from a gathering in Mexico of Asia-Pacific leaders who agreed that North Korea must halt its banned nuclear arms programme.
"Stopping the construction of nuclear reactors and provision of heavy fuel oil to the North shouldn't be an option for resolving the current standoff involving Pyongyang's self-confessed nuclear programme," Mr Kim was quoted as saying in a speech to Korean-Americans in Seattle.
"Such economic sanctions would likely lead to a repeat of the nuclear crisis in the early 1990s," he said.
In 1994, bidding to halt an earlier North Korean nuclear arms programme, the United States struck a deal promising Pyongyang a package of safe nuclear reactors and fuel oil deliveries in exchange for mothballing its plutonium-based weapons development.