United nations - The Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) UN ambassador said on Wednesday that US modernization of its nuclear weapons and expansion of its missile defense systems will eventually spark a new nuclear arms race.

Sin Son-ho told a General Assembly meeting on revitalizing the Conference on Disarmament, which the DPRK chairs this month, that if "the largest nuclear weapon state" - a reference to the United States - wants to stop the spread of nuclear weapons "it should show its good example by negotiating the Treaty of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons".

"The total and complete elimination of nuclear weapons remains the consistent policy of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," he said.

But Sin said modernization projects including making small nuclear weapons that can be used like conventional weapons and expanding missile defense systems show that the US "has lost its legal or moral justifications to talk of proliferation issues".

His remarks came on the eve of talks between US Ambassador Stephen Bosworth and DPRK Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan in New York on Thursday and Friday on the possibility of reviving disarmament talks after more than a year of animosity and high tension between the DPRK and the Republic of Korea (ROK).

The ROK on Thursday called on the DPRK to show "sincerity" in its talks with the US over the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

"We are hoping that the talks would verify the DPRK's sincerity in its commitment to denuclearization and serve as a useful opportunity to check just how ready it is," ROK Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Byung-jae told reporters on Thursday.

The discussions aim to build on last week's talks between nuclear negotiators from the DPRK and the ROK in Indonesia, the first such meeting since disarmament talks collapsed in 2008. The US Mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sin's comments about the US sparking a new nuclear arms race.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said earlier that the US wants to determine if the DPRK is ready "to fulfill its commitments" under a 2005 agreement requiring Pyongyang to abandon all nuclear weapons programs and allow a return of international inspections.

Sin challenged the missile defense systems "being pushed under the pretext of responding to so-called ballistic missile developments by what they call 'rogue states'".

The nature and scope of these systems demonstrate that the real target is "none other than the gaining of absolute nuclear superiority and global hegemony over the other nuclear power rivals", he said.

"In the current changing world, one can easily understand that this dangerous move will eventually spark a new nuclear arms race," Sin said.

The 65-nation Conference on Disarmament, the world's only multilateral forum for nuclear arms diplomacy, hasn't produced anything substantial since the 1996 nuclear test-ban treaty, a pact now on hold because key nations, including the US, have not ratified it.

AP-Xinhua

(China Daily 07/29/2011 page11)