The announcement from the North's foreign ministry came on the eve of new six-nation talks starting in China on Tuesday amid an international push to get Pyongyang to abandon nuclear weapons.

The United States on Thursday said the talks, resuming more than a year after the North walked away from the bargaining table, should open without any preconditions from Pyongyang.

A peace mechanism would lead to an end of Washington's "hostile" policy toward North Korea, which in turn would "automatically result in the de-nuclearization of the peninsula," the North's spokesman said.

"The building of a peace mechanism is a process which the DPRK and the US should go through without fail in order to attain the goal of de-nuclearizing the Korean Peninsula," the official Korean Central News Agency quoted the unnamed spokesman as saying.

North Korea is technically still at war with the United States and South Korea, with the 1950-1953 Korean War ending only in an armistice and not a peace treaty.

Analysts said the latest statement underlined the importance the Stalinist state attaches to solving the nuclear issue in the framework of ending the Cold War rivalry with Washington.

"It has always been Pyongyang's diplomatic goal of top priority to replace the armistice with a peace treaty and enter diplomatic ties with Washington," said Paik Hak-Soon of the Sejong Institute.

In an interview with China's Xinhua news agency, a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman added that Washington should also de-list the Stalinist state as a supporter of terrorism and lift sanctions against it.

Urging North Korea not to set preconditions, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Pyongyang should make the "strategic decision" to abandon its nuclear weapons drive for better relations with the rest of the world.

Pyongyang broke off the six-way discussions in June 2004, rejecting a US offer then on the table which required an up-front pledge to dismantle all nuclear programs before getting energy and other assistance.

The North instead wanted a step-by-step approach, fearing it could come under attack by the United States.

But it made a surprise announcement earlier this month that it would again start talking, days before South Korea offered to build new power lines across the border and provide electricity to the North.

South Korea also pledged 500,000 tonnes of rice to the starving and isolated nation.

Under a 1994 US-North Korea accord, an international consortium had been building two nuclear-power reactors in the North.

One-third of the project had been completed when it came to a halt after Pyongyang allegedly told US officials in October 2002 that it was running a uranium enrichment program.

The CIA believes Pyongyang has at least one or two crude nuclear bombs.

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