America will not accept a nuclear-armed North Korea

The United States warned yesterday it would not accept a nuclear-armed North Korea while China called for calm amid signs that Pyongyang was preparing to stage a new long-range missile exercise.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates told a high-level security forum in Singapore that North Korea's defiant acts, including an atomic bomb test earlier this week, could spark an arms race with serious consequences for Asia.

"Our goal is complete and verifiable denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, and we will not accept North Korea as a nuclear state," Gates said.

Reiterating the US commitment to defend Asian partners from attack, he said any transfer of nuclear weapons and material by Pyongyang to other countries or "non-state entities" would be "a grave threat to the United States and our allies." North Korea would be held "fully accountable" for the consequences, he said. Gates met with his counterparts from South Korea and Japan to discuss the nuclear issue on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual meeting organised by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

"We have pledged to craft a common response to such situations," South Korea's Lee Sang Hee said after the nearly hour-long meeting.

Gates said it was the first trilateral meeting involving the defence chiefs of the three countries. The nuclear tensions in the Korean peninsula were supposed to be resolved by six-party talks also involving China, Russia and North Korea.

They had agreed in 2007 to provide aid and security guarantees to North Korea in return for denuclearisation but Pyongyang stormed out of the accord last month after the UN Security Council unanimously condemned its earlier long-range missile launch.

"The six-party talks is still the prime vehicle but at the same time we need to be thinking about what more we need to do to exert pressure and prepare for our own defences," a US defence official said after yesterday's meeting.

In a statement yesterday the Kremlin said Moscow and Tokyo agreed that the North Korean nuclear tests merit a strong response and threaten international security. The statement said that in a telephone conversation Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso agreed "that one has to seriously respond (to the tests), which represent a challenge to international security".