The United States on Friday rejected the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s demands for direct talks over its nuclear weapons program and insisted on six-party negotiations.  

"It's not an issue between North Korea and the United States; it's a regional issue," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

"There's plenty of opportunities for North Korea to speak directly with us in the context of the six-party talks," he said.

The DPRK has demanded bilateral talks with Washington to defuse the tension created by its announcement that it is a nuclear power, Pyongyang's UN envoy said in a newspaper Friday.

"We will return to the six-nation talks when we see a reason to do so and the conditions are ripe,'' Han told Seoul's Hankyoreh newspaper in an interview published Friday.

"If the United States moves to have direct dialogue with us, we can take that as a signal that the United States is changing its hostile policy toward us."

The US State Department reiterated on Thursday that the six-party talks continue to be "the best, most effective way" to solve nuclear disputes on the Korean Peninsula.

Washington made the statement after Pyongyang admitted on Thursday for the first time that it has nuclear weapons, and said it would not return to six-party talks designed to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.

The US intelligence believe that Pyongyang has produced one and possibly two nuclear weapons.

Since August 2003, China, the US, the DPRK, Russia, the Republic of Korea and Japan have held three rounds of talks in Beijing aimed at peacefully resolving the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. But Pyongyang refused to attend the fourth round of talks scheduled for last September, citing hostile US policy.

(Xinhua News Agency February 12, 2005)