North Korea should bring international inspectors back to its nuclear facilities and declare a moratorium on its nuclear activities before stalled multilateral denuclearization talks can resume, a senior South Korean foreign ministry official said Wednesday.
Repeating that Seoul was not interested in holding the six-party talks just for talks' sake, the official said the North should take actions matching the 750,000 tons of heavy fuel oil it has received as energy aid.
"The least North Korea can do is to reinstate inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and to declare it would disable its nuclear facilities to a certain level," the official told reporters.
Under a series of agreements signed between 2005 and 2008 among the six-party members -- South and North Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan -- Pyongyang disabled its nuclear reactor and other facilities at its Yongbyon complex and blew up a cooling tower as a show of its commitment to the accords.
But negotiations later derailed over verification of North Korea's nuclear program and renewed suspicions of clandestine activities, and the North pulled out of the six-party talks and went ahead with nuclear and missile tests.
In the last six-party accord signed in December 2008, the North's five negotiating partners had agreed to provide the energy-strapped communist regime with 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil in exchange for Pyongyang's denuclearization steps, of which 750,000 tons had been delivered when Pyongyang left the table.
"We and other participants spent a great deal of money on the fuel," the official said. "And North Korea should take denuclearization steps that would match our efforts. There has to be something irreversible on the North Korean part. That would show its willingness for denuclearization."
The official said the South Korean proposal last year of a "grand bargain," in which President Lee Myung-bak offered North Korea massive economic assistance for sweeping denuclearization, was still valid.
"There is a common understanding among five members (other than North Korea) on the validity of the grand bargain," the official said. "As long as North Korea is willing to denuclearize, we'd like to represent the five states in negotiating the deal with North Korea."
Prospects for the talks' resumption turned bleak in May when Seoul, citing results of a multinational probe, blamed Pyongyang for sinking a South Korean warship, Cheonan, two months earlier. Forty-six sailors died in the incident.
Seoul had preconditioned the restart of the nuclear talks to an apology by Pyongyang, which denies any responsibility. But in August, a ministry official left some room for compromise, saying the ship sinking and the six-party talks were "different matters."
The senior official on Wednesday also said a North Korea apology "is not directly linked to" the six-party talks, but repeated that North Korea needs to "do something to reverse the situation."
When pressed for specifics, the official said, "We will know it when North Korea takes action."