North Korea has no friends left to shield it from the international community's demands that the country scrap its nuclear activities, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday.

Ms Clinton said many nations had told a low-level North Korean delegation at a regional security meeting on the Thai island of Phuket to give up its nuclear weapons.

Speaking at a news conference, Ms Clinton said North Korea's pursuit of its nuclear ambitions could provoke an arms race in North Asia, one of the world's most dynamic regions and responsible for a sixth of the global economy.

"Our partners in the region understand that a nuclear North Korea has far-reaching consequences for the security future of northeast Asia... This would serve no nation's interests," she said on the sidelines of the Asean Regional Forum. "There is no place to go for North Korea, they have no friends left that will protect them from the international community's efforts to move towards denuclearisation."

Ms Clinton said the North Korean delegation gave no sign the country was interested in ending its nuclear programme, which took centre stage at yesterday's talks after Pyongyang's recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests.

North Korea, bristling at being described by Ms Clinton this week as behaving like an unruly child, responded in kind yesterday, calling her vulgar and less than clever. The North's KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying her comments "suggests she is by no means intelligent".

"Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping," KCNA said.