SKorean president says NKorea should know consequences of nuclear test

South Korea's president called Wednesday for measures to let North Korea be aware of the consequences if it carries out a nuclear test, a news report said.

Photo: SKorean president says NKorea should know consequences of nuclear test

"We need measures to let North Korea know clearly what consequences it will cause if it really goes ahead with a (nuclear) test," Roh Moo-hyun said in a Cabinet meeting, Yonhap news agency reported, citing presidential spokesman Yoon Tae-young.

It was not immediately clear what those measures would be.

The communist North announced Tuesday it plans to conduct a nuclear test, reports AP.

According to Houston Chronicle North Korea did not say when it would attempt to test a weapon, and experts inside and outside the Bush administration said the announcement itself is a negotiating ploy, intended to force the White House into lifting economic sanctions and conducting one-on-one talks.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to a small group of reporters in Managua, Nicaragua, at a conference of hemispheric military leaders, said: "The six party talks are the proper method for dealing with North Korea."

He said it was being worked by the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.

Rumsfeld added, "They are active prolificators, and were they to test and were they then to proliferate those technologies ... obviously we'd be living in a somewhat different world."

According to a statement by the North Korean Foreign Ministry, Pyongyang will conduct a nuclear test, but will not use nuclear weapons first nor assist in their proliferation. It also said in the statement that it will make efforts for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a goal confirmed in the joint statement for the six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear development in September 2005.

But if North Korea pushes ahead with the nuclear test, the international community will judge the North Korean Foreign Ministry's statement to be hollow, informs The Daily Yomiuri.