Bush Rejects N. Korea Call For Talks

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea said yesterday that it wants direct talks with America over its apparent plans to test-fire a long-range missile, but a top American envoy rejected the request.

North Korea this week issued a bristling declaration of its right to carry out the launch and said American concerns should be resolved through negotiations. The American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, said a missile threat wasn't the way to seek dialogue.

"You don't normally engage in conversations by threatening to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, and it's not a way to produce a conversation because if you acquiesce in aberrant behavior, you simply encourage the repetition of it, which we're obviously not going to do," Mr. Bolton told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York.

President Bush said North Korea faces further isolation from the international community if it test-fires the missile believed capable of reaching American soil.

"It should make people nervous when nontransparent regimes, who have announced they have nuclear warheads, fire missiles," Mr. Bush said at a meeting with European leaders in Vienna, Austria. "This is not the way you conduct business in the world."

A spokesman for a former South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, cited the missile crisis as the reason for canceling a trip next week to the North that could have offered a rare chance for talks to soothe tensions.

South Korea also said its humanitarian aid to North Korea might be affected by such a test.

"If North Korea test-fires a missile, it might have an impact on aid of rice and fertilizer to North Korea," the South Korean unification minister, Lee Jongseok, told opposition lawmakers, according to his spokesman.

South Korea has shipped 150,000 tons of fertilizer this year and had planned to send another 200,000 tons. Pyongyang has asked for 500,000 tons of rice this year, but Seoul has yet to agree.

At the Vienna summit, the Austrian chancellor, Wolfgang Schuessel, said that if North Korea fires the missile, Europe would join America in condemning it.