North Korea on Saturday lambasted the US for attaching preconditions to any dialogue between the states, as Seoul prepares to send an envoy to Pyongyang to help open talks on easing the nuclear stand-off on the peninsula. A spokesperson for the North's foreign ministry said a dialogue with the US is "possible", but added that Pyongyang is open to talks only "on an equal footing" and will not give up its nuclear and missile programmes to come to the table.
In the decades-long history of North-US talks, "there had been no case at all where we sat with the US on any precondition, and this will be the case in future, too", the spokesperson was quoted as saying by the North's KCNA news agency. "We have intention to resolve issues in a diplomatic and peaceful way through dialogue and negotiation, but we will neither beg for dialogue nor evade the military option claimed by the US", he said.
Pyongyang has long expressed its desire to talk to Washington without preconditions. But the US says it must first take concrete steps toward disarming, and has ruled out any possibility of talks before Pyongyang - which last year staged multiple missile and nuclear tests - moves towards denuclearisation.
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