South Korea and Japan "will never tolerate" a nuclear-armed North Korea, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak said Sunday after talks in Tokyo with Prime Minister Taro Aso.
Lee and Aso agreed to press North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme amid Pyongyang's continued sabre-rattling, and called for China to play a greater role in persuading its ally to disarm, they said in a news conference.
"During the talks, we confirmed that we will never tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea," Lee told reporters. "Through implementing UN resolution 1874, we need to show North Korea that they will gain nothing by obtaining nuclear weapons," Lee said, referring to UN sanctions against Pyongyang for its recent nuclear and missile tests.
Aso said: "We agreed to strengthen co-operation between Japan, South Korea and the United States, and agreed on the need to deepen co-operation with China."
China, North Korea's main ally, has always favoured cautious diplomacy toward Pyongyang, wary of any moves that could push the isolated regime to collapse and potentially send millions of refugees streaming over its border.
The summit came as Pyongyang has stepped up its confrontational rhetoric amid global suspicions that Kim Jong-Il's administration is preparing to fire more missiles and stage a military exercise off the North's east coast.
Regional tension spiked after North Korea on May 25 carried out its second nuclear test, followed by missile launches. North Korea has also abandoned six-party talks on its nuclear disarmament, which involved the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.
Lee and Aso discussed the idea of holding five-party talks excluding Pyongyang, "with an aim of making progress in the six-party talks," Aso said. Tokyo and Seoul have led the push in East Asia against the North's increasingly antagonistic stance, in which Pyongyang has repeatedly warned of a military confrontation. North Korea has vowed to build more nuclear bombs and to start a new weapons programme based on uranium enrichment in response to the UN sanctions.
The North Sunday renewed its verbal offensive, threatening to bolster its nuclear deterrence against the United States, a close ally of South Korea and Japan.
"We will strengthen our nuclear deterrence further for our self-defence to cope with outright US nuclear threats and nuclear war attempts," Pyongyang's ruling communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said.
Rodong said the North's nuclear drive could be justified by the "US introduction of nuclear weapons into South Korea," despite the denial by Seoul and Washington that there are US nuclear weapons on South Korean soil.
Lee's one-day trip to Tokyo was part of regular "shuttle summit diplomacy," a system that sees the leaders visit each other twice a year for talks on issues including diplomatic and economic matters.
Lee and Aso also agreed to hold a senior-official level meeting on July 1 to resume stalled negotiations on a bilateral free trade deal. "The bilateral free trade agreement should be completed," Lee said, adding that "South Korea will fight protectionism" amid a global recession.
The South Korean president also said that he had asked Aso "to give Korean residents in Japan the right to vote in local assembly elections."
The majority of Korean residents in Japan are descendants of forced labourers brought to Japan during its colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula in the first half of the 20th century.
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