Further discussion was no longer necessary, officials from the isolated regime said, even though parties to the three-day meeting which ended Friday had agreed to hold another round of talks.

The gathering was "not only useless but harmful in every aspect," a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement on the official Korean Central News Agency.

"Betraying our expectation, the talks turned out to be no more than armchair arguments and degenerated into a stage show to force us to disarm," the spokesman was quoted as saying.

"We are now more convinced then before that we have no other alternatives but to continue strengthening our nuclear deterrence as a self-defensive measure to protect our sovereignty."

An analyst at an influential Beijing thinktank played down the significance of the angry rhetoric.

"It doesn't mean North Korea will not participate in the next talks," said the analyst, who asked not to be identified. "But it means they play hard to get."

North Korea repeated during the talks its long-standing demand for a non-aggression pact with the United States, which it accuses of wanting to invade.

It also demanded the normalization of diplomatic relations with Washington before it would abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Washington has been adamant that North Korea's nuclear programs must be dismantled before it will consider economic assistance and diplomatic normalization for the bankrupt country.

A North Korean official indicated deep disappointment at the results of the meeting as he was leaving China from Beijing's international airport on Saturday.

"These talks are no longer necessary," he told journalists. "In the end, we came to have neither interest nor expectation."

It was unclear if the official, who said he was a working-level spokesman for the North Korean delegation, was referring specifically to last week's three days of talks or the six-party process in its entirety.

The official, who did not identify himself by name, declined to answer whether North Korea would attend a new round of meetings on the nuclear issue.

Reacting to North Korea's statements, the Chinese foreign ministry urged all parties involved in the Korean nuclear dispute to go on talking.

"We hope all parties will continue their efforts and continue the meeting process in order to conscientiously put the Korean nuclear issue back on the track towards solution through dialogue," the ministry said in a statement.

Despite the inconclusive nature of the talks, the participants -- North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia -- agreed on Friday more discussions were needed, but failed to set a date.

As he left China, top US delegate James Kelly said the meeting had marked "a productive start," but that much work lay ahead.

"We've got a very long way to travel," Kelly said in his first direct comments on the issue of Beijing.

"I don't know when we'll be back here or whether it will be somewhere else, but peaceful solution is something we're going to work on," he said.

South Korea, meanwhile, delivered an upbeat assessment of the meeting.

"We can have a positive outlook from the talks," said Ra Jong-Yil, President Roh Moo-Hun's senior advisor on national security.

"North Korea has said possessing nuclear weapons is not its ultimate goal and this is a considerable step forward. The United States also showed flexibility and this is another positive outcome," he said on local radio.

The United States warned Friday it would not submit to nuclear "blackmail" from North Korea, accusing its Cold War enemy of souring the talks in Beijing.

Pyongyang had made an "explicit acknowledgement" it was now a nuclear power, the State Department noted, threatening it would test a nuclear weapon and warning it had the means to deliver it.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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