The UN Security Council met to discuss the North Korean nuclear crisis today, with China bent on blocking efforts to issue a unanimous condemnation of its Stalinist neighbour.
Britain, France and especially the United States are seeking to bring UN pressure to bear on Pyongyang, but the other two permanent Security Council members, China and Russia, argue that such a move would only aggravate an already volatile situation.
The breadth of the divide between the two camps was highlighted by the fact that Beijing and Moscow had both opposed making the issue a subject of Security Council discussions in the first place.
"We would like to see the members of the Council strongly reiterating their position in favour of a political solution of this issue," Russian ambassador to the UN, Mr Sergey Lavrov, said before the start of the meeting.
"Condemnations will not help and whatever multilateral formats might be used, they would not produce results without a direct dialogue between the United States and North Korea," he added.
The current crisis has its roots in North Korea's announcements last October that it was expelling UN nuclear inspectors and restarting its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon that can produce weapons grade plutonium. Since then, Pyongyang has also withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has test-launched a missile.
Washington believes Pyongyang has one or two nuclear bombs and could make several more within six months if it continued on its present course.
Pyongyang wants direct talks with the United States and a non-aggression pact, but Washington has rejected the offer saying the crisis should be solved through multilateral channels.
At the same time, Bush and other top US officials have denied they are considering military options to force North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. Pyongyang has also warned that it would view any imposition of UN sanctions as an outright "declaration of war".
China, which still has close links with North Korea, insists that the international community must avoid any sudden action that could inflame the situation.
AFP