MUSKEGON, Michigan, Sept 13 (AFP) - US President George W. Bush's chief spokesman warned Monday that Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry would, if elected, take "a failed approach" to ending North Korea's nuclear programs.
"It would be the wrong approach to go down that road again," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, referring to former US president Bill Clinton's approach of bilateral negotiations with the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang.
"That failed policy allowed North Korea to dupe the United States," which agreed to help North Korea's nuclear energy program in return for freezing its atomic weapons program, the spokesman said.
McClellan's comments came after Kerry told The New York Times that Bush had allowed "a nuclear nightmare" develop by focusing on Iraq and not dealing with North Korea after he came to office in January 2001.
"I think that this is one of the most serious failures and challenges to the security of the United States, and it really underscores the way in which George Bush talks the game but doesn't deliver," said Kerry.
Kerry says he would support bilateral talks in addition to ongoing six-party negotiations Bush supports to defuse the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programs.
"The president has all of North Korea's neighbors actively engaged in six-party talks to achieve a diplomatic solution to North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons. The goal is the complete and verifiable end of North Korea's nuclear program -- not a freeze," said McClellan.
In the 1994 deal reached with Clinton, the North Koreans "said that they would agree to a freeze on their nuclear weapons programs. And we found that they, in fact, did not freeze their nuclear weapons programs," he added.
"That policy was a failed approach."
But McClellan, repeatedly prodded by reporters, McClellan did not point to any tangible signs of progress towards dismantling North Korea's nuclear programs.