The prospect of resolving the nuclear issue between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States will depend on the attitude of the United States, a spokesman of the DPRK Foreign Ministry said in Pyongyang Sunday.  

The spokesman made the remarks when answering the question raised by KCNA as regards the issue of opening the next round of the six-way talks.

He said the DPRK maintains the invariable stand to "seek a negotiated peaceful solution to the nuclear issue after advancing a proposal for a package solution ultimately aimed to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula."

The spokesman stressed the DPRK's willingness to adopt a flexible stand on the non-aggression treaty issue.

"Only recently, we clarified the constructive stand that we are willing to take into consideration 'written assurances of non-aggression' to which President (George W.) Bush referred instead of the non-aggression treaty which the United States finds it hard to accept and we can modify even the phraseology of the principle of simultaneous actions, taking the US concerns into account," the spokesman said.

"As the DPRK declared more than once, it is ready to abandon in practice its nuclear program which the United States is concerned about at the phase where its hostile policy is fundamentally dropped and its threat to us removed in practice," he added.

He stressed that the prospect of solving the nuclear issue will depend on whether the United States is ready to accept the proposal for a package solution based on the principle of simultaneous actions, which commands the support and sympathy of all the participants of the talks.

(Xinhua News Agency November 17, 2003)