Washington:The Bush administration is not yet ready for broad engagement with North Korea, despite signals that US ties with the Stalinist nation are warming, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Associated Press.

Speaking just a day after the New York Philharmonic announced it would play a concert in Pyongyang and a week after President George W Bush wrote a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Rice said yesterday that the US government would not "engage broadly" with the Kim's government until it ended all aspects of its nuclear weapons programme.

"This is not a regime that the United States is prepared to engage broadly," she said in an interview at her State Department office. "If we are going to engage it broadly, it s clear in the programme that we have laid out how that would happen, after denuclearisation."

"What matters first and foremost is that we deal with the nuclear weapons programmes, all of them, of the North Koreans," Rice said. "It remains a country that is dangerously armed and a considerable threat on both the proliferation front and its own programme."

She said neither the orchestra's trip in February, which the State Department encouraged, nor Bush s letter should indicate an easing in the administration s determination to deal with North Korea, a charter member of the president s "axis of evil," along with Iran and Saddam Hussein s Iraq before the US-led invasion.

Rice said Bush s missive, which was sent to Kim and the other leaders of the international group trying to negotiate the denuclearization, simply was part of the "active diplomacy" now under way to resolve the matter.

Source : PTI