The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Monday said that the United States has made the fourth round of the six-party talks abortive by turning down the proposal of "reward for freeze" advanced by the DPRK and applying "double standards." 

The third round of the talks had agreed to hold the next round of talks at the end of September and a working meeting ahead of the talks. However, due to the dispute between the DPRK and the United States, the meeting and the talks failed to be held.

"The United States turned down the DPRK's proposal for the 'reward for freeze' at the three rounds of the six-party talks and merely insisted on its old assertion that the DPRK must accept the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement (CVID), thus deliberately laying an obstacle in the way of the negotiations," said the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in a commentary.

"The recent disclosure of a series of nuclear-related secret experiments in South Korea clearly proves that the double standards applied by the United States is a stumbling block in the way of solving the nuclear issue and a factor of nuclear proliferation," said the KCNA.

Earlier this month, South Korea admitted two groups of scientists respectively conducted experiments of extracting small amount of plutonium in 1982 and separated 0.2 gram of uranium in 2000.

It was the unshakable stand of the DPRK that it can no longer discuss the issue of resuming the six-party talks and renounce its nuclear deterrent force unless the Untied States drops its double standards and hostile policy toward the DPRK in regard to the nuclear issue.

"The Bush administration had better stop making sheer sophism intended to evade the responsibility for having overturned the groundwork of the talks and come out to the negotiations with a willingness to renounce its hostile policy toward the DPRK and double standards concerning the nuclear issue in practice," said the commentary.

(Xinhua News Agency September 28, 2004)