Last chance for N Korea to give in: IAEA

The IAEA board set no deadline at its emergency meeting in Vienna for N Korea to comply and defuse a crisis over its suspected atomic weapons programme.

But agency Chief Mohamed el Baradei, saying Pyongyang had ‘‘one more chance’’, told a news conference: ‘‘It’s clearly a matter of weeks.’’

El Baradei said N Korea, which vowed the ‘‘destruction’’ of the US if Washington attacked, would be reported to the Security Council if it failed to cooperate. The IAEA board demanded immediate talks with N Korean officials. The toughly worded resolution said the IAEA ‘‘calls upon the DPRK (North Korea) to cooperate urgently and fully with the agency by allowing the re-establishment of the required containment and surveillance measures at its nuclear facilities and…the return of IAEA inspectors’’.

‘‘Unless the DPRK takes all necessary steps to allow the agency to implement all the required safeguard measures, the DPRK will be in further non-compliance with its safeguards agreement,’’ it said.

If N Korea is reported to the Security Council, the body has the power to authorise military action. But Washington — in contrast with its stance over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — has been at pains to emphasise it sought a diplomatic solution in the crisis with Pyongyang.

Voicing defiance before the IAEA decision, N Korea denounced Washington’s missile defence system and threatened the US with destruction if it launched a nuclear attack over Pyongyang’s suspected atomic weapons programme.

North Korea said it had ‘‘increased its self-defensive military capability’’ to cope with the ‘‘US intensified policy to invade and stifle it with nukes’’.

‘‘If the US unleashes a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, it will not escape its own destruction,’’ Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

In Washington, South Korean officials were to present Seoul’s plan to reduce tensions to US and Japanese delegates at a regular meeting of the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group.

‘‘Our mediation plans will be discussed at the talks with the US and Japan in Washington,’’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Kim Euy-taek said. (Reuters)