US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated the goal last week amid reports the United States would try to tempt North Korea with security guarantees, possible lifting of sanctions and other carrots.

The incentives and what North Korea must do in return for them will be the main focus of the new round of six-nation talks -- involving the two Koreas, the United States, host China, Japan and Russia -- which first began in 2003.

But a wide range of analysts and seasoned North Korea watchers contacted by AFP were unanimous in their assessment that Kim Jong-Il had no intention of surrendering the nuclear program his nation had spent decades developing.

"North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons will never happen," said John Feffer, the global affairs director at the US-based International Relations Center.

"Now that North Korea has the nuclear bargaining chip, it is never going to give it up. And the United States is not in a position to change North Korea's position."

When North Korea returns to the negotiating table, it will be 63 days since it conducted its first ever nuclear test on October 9.

The test triggered widespread international condemnation -- including from closest ally and neighbor China -- and led to United Nations sanctions against Kim's regime.

A popular view put forward by the United States is that the global pressure forced North Korea to return to the talks, after it boycotted them for 13 months in protest at US financial sanctions imposed for money laundering.

But Scott Bruce, the program officer at the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, which specializes in North Korean nuclear issues, said the nation had come back to the talks on its own terms.

"North Korea wants to make an appearance at the talks as a normal, nuclear weapons state and announce its perceived equality to the US," Bruce said.

He said North Korea was using the talks to buy itself more time to develop its nuclear program.

"Every day that passes is one more day until (US President) George Bush leaves office and one more day that the DPRK (North Korea) gets to continue to reprocess plutonium and build its nuclear arsenal," he said.

Zhang Liangui, a professor with one of China's schools for its Communist Party elite, wrote recently that reversing North Korea's nuclear status was possible, but extremely unlikely.

"The nuclear test conducted by... North Korea reveals that government leaders long ago made a decision to develop and possess nuclear weapons," Zhang wrote in China Security, a journal of the US-based World Security Institute.

"Having made such a commitment, it is unlikely that they will give them up -- not for anything."

One way that North Korea could be swayed into giving up its nuclear weapons was if China and South Korea withdrew their economic support that keeps the desperately poor nation running.

But the two nations have made clear they are not prepared to do that for a range of reasons, high among them the fear of triggering regime change.

Amid such sentiments, analysts scoffed at the US goal of disarming North Korea in two years, saying the Bush administration knew this was impossible but dare not admit it because of so many other foreign policy failures.

Feffer, of the International Relations Center, said continuing the talks allowed Washington to give the appearance of hope to the US electorate on North Korea.

"With Iraq falling apart, the Taliban rising in Afghanistan and Iran thumbing its nose at Washington, the Bush administration would like to be able to say, before the next elections, that it handled at least one foreign policy crisis adequately," he said.

earlier related report
Nation that Can Not Feed Itself Puts Nuclear Weapons First
Seoul (AFP) Dec 15 - North Korea, a reclusive Stalinist nation that cannot feed its people or power many of its factories, has striven for decades to develop nuclear weapons. The country whose ideology is "juche", or self-reliance, has depended on food aid for much of the past decade to feed many of its 23 million people. Hundreds of people died in a famine that started in 1995 and went on for years.

Refugee aid group Helping Hands Korea has warned that North Koreans may again face famine this winter as disenchanted international donors cut back on aid after missile tests in July and a nuclear test on October 9.

South Korea suspended regular rice and fertiliser aid shipments after the missile tests and continued the suspension after the nuclear detonation.

Officially the North, which since its creation in 1948 has maintained a policy of unrelenting hostility to Washington, blames US threats to attack it and weaken it through sanctions for its test.

But its policy of Songun, or "army first", may also have played a large part. The slogan first appeared around August 1998 when the North alarmed Japan by launching a long-range missile over the country.

"It has maintained this rhetoric, prompting some to speculate that internal divisions led (leader) Kim Jong-Il to try to solidify his position in the eyes of his million-man army," the International Crisis Group wrote in a recent report.

Kim may also have used the nuclear test to rally public support before what is expected to be a hard winter. The "Dear Leader" is widely believed to be less popular than his father and founding president Kim Il-Sung -- the Great Leader.

Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 after fostering a personality cult bordering on idolatry, but officially remains president for eternity inside his mausoleum.

The younger Kim took over leadership of the ruling party in 1997 amid acute economic difficulties.

The economy, already burdened by the cost of the world's fourth largest military force, shrank in 1997 for the eighth successive year since the collapse of communism in former benefactor the Soviet Union.

The younger Kim opened the reclusive state to some degree, including a landmark summit with South Korea in 2000.

Two years later the regime introduced limited reforms to the centralised command economy, allowing some flexibility in state-set prices and granting incentives to workplaces and workers.

But in October 2005 it banned private grain sales and announced a return to centralised food rationing.

At the end of 2005 the North suspended the World Food Programme's 10-year emergency programme and severely curtailed its activities. Food aid now comes mainly from China and South Korea and energy from China.

Outside Pyongyang, where the elite and other privileged classes largely live, life remains harsh. A US State Department report said the nation "continues to suffer chronic food shortages and malnutrition."

The North's rights record is also widely condemned.

A United Nations panel last month cited "torture, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention, the absence of due process and the rule of law, the imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor".

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