Rice weighs carrots and sticks on North Korea proliferation

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talks on a mobile phone during a visit by U.S. President George Bush (not pictured) at Osu Castle in Accra February 20, 2008. Rice visits South Korea, China and Japan next week to seek ways to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear programs before the window closes on the Bush administration. (REUTERS/Jason Reed)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday she would explore how to use a mix of carrots and sticks to address North Korea's nuclear program and proliferation during a visit to Asia next week.

Rice will attend Monday's inauguration of South Korean President-elect Lee Myung-bak and then visit Beijing and Tokyo to discuss how to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear programs before the window closes on the Bush administration.

President George W. Bush has less than a year left to wean North Korea of its nuclear ambitions in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits under a 2005 deal in which Pyongyang agreed to abandon all of its nuclear weapons and programs.

At the top of Rice's agenda will be reviving the six-party agreement under which North Korea has begun to dismantle key nuclear facilities at Yongbyon but has balked at providing a complete declaration of all of its nuclear programs.

The agreement was hammered out among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

"We have the right group of countries at that table with the right set of incentives and disincentives to address not just denuclearization, which obviously is extremely important, but also proliferation," Rice told a news conference.

"I'll be carrying that message and discussing that with our partners."

Making her first trip to Northeast Asia in over a year, Rice has no plans to see any North Koreans or visit Pyongyang, where the New York Philharmonic will play a concert featuring the works of Antonin Dvorak and George Gershwin on Tuesday.

Rice said she hoped the musical diplomacy might eventually help open up the hermit nation, which is ruled as a dictatorship and criticized for human rights abuses and tight controls on citizens' contact with the outside world.

DVORAK DIPLOMACY

While saying it was a "good thing" the orchestra will visit, Rice added: "The North Korean regime is still the North Korean regime. And so, I don't think we should get carried away with what listening to Dvorak is going to do in North Korea."

The six-party process has been stymied by North Korea's failure to meet a December 31 deadline to declare all its nuclear programs. U.S. officials view the declaration as a necessary condition for removing certain sanctions on Pyongyang and as a key step toward its eventual denuclearization.

The declaration's sticking point has been Pyongyang's reluctance to discuss transfers of nuclear technology to other nations, notably Syria, as well as its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment, American officials and analysts say.

North Korea has produced plutonium, which can be used to make atomic bombs, at Yongbyon. Uranium enrichment would give it a second pathway to fissile material for nuclear weapons.

The United States has questions about any possible North Korean role in a suspected Syrian covert nuclear site bombed by Israel in September. Syria has denied having a nuclear program but the case remains murky.

A senior U.S. official said Washington was exploring whether Pyongyang might disclose any proliferation and uranium enrichment in a separate document to be kept secret. He said China and South Korea had floated ideas to North Korea on what it might say in such a document but the United States had not.

However, he insisted that North Korea must disclose all of its nuclear programs at the same time to be relieved of sanctions under the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list and the U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA).

He ruled out North Korea offering some information up front and disclosing the proliferation and uranium enrichment later.

"The difficulty with that is that the North is quite clear that ... their expectation is that they would be removed from the terrorism list and TWEA. And those things really are impossible to consider without this issue settled," he said.

Lee's inauguration may give Washington a way to get tougher with Pyongyang because of his plans to link economic aid to North Korea with progress on denuclearization.

The U.S. official played down the idea of the United States itself taking a harder line, saying it would consider more punitive measures if it concluded the six-party process had ground to a halt but that it was not near such a conclusion.

"We continue to believe that however slowly -- however painfully slowly -- their system is moving, it is trying to grapple with this question" of making the declaration.

He said it was remarkable that North Korea had begun the process of giving up its nuclear programs and had allowed U.S. technicians to disable Yongbyon.

"That is not a simple thing. So, I think those who want to claim this should be done on an American schedule are really quite naive about dealing with a place as closed up as North Korea," he said. "This takes patience. This takes effort."

(Additional reporting by Paul Eckert; Editing by Chris Wilson)