WASHINGTON, Sept 13 (AFP) - President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry dueled Monday over how to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons programs but neither side offered any bold new initiatives.
The White House lashed back Monday at Kerry after the Massachusetts senator accused Bush of a "massive national security failure" in allowing Pyongyang to pursue its efforts to develop nuclear arms unchecked.
The Bush administration defended its reliance on multiateral talks and said Kerry would return to the "failed" Clinton administration policy of direct talks and material incentives to try to wean the North Koreans off their nuclear ambitions.
"That failed policy allowed North Korea to dupe the United States," Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One. "It would be the wrong approach to go down that road again."
North Korea has made no secret of their atomic activities. Weapons inspectors and others have called the insular Stalinist state the biggest threat to efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.
Reports of a large explosion over the weekend sparked fears that Pyongyang had conducted a nuclear test. US officials denied this and North Korea said later it was a demolition blast at a hydro-electric power project.
But despite the dire warnings, neither Bush nor Kerry has come out with any new ideas to break the diplomatic impasse. Nor have they moved to force North Korea's hand by brandishing the threat of military action, like in Iraq.
Kerry, in a statement Sunday and an interview published Monday in the New York Times, accused Bush of allowing "a nuclear nightmare" to develop by focusing on Iraq and ignoring 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," he told the Times.
"A potential route to a nuclear 9/11 is clearly visible," he said in the statement a day after the United States marked the third anniversary of the deadly 2001 terrorist attacks.
But the Democrat, trailing Bush in the polls ahead of their November 2 showdown for the presidency, offered little new in the way of action to counter the threat from North Korea.
He said the six-party talks initiated by Bush, including China, South Korea, Japan and Russia as well as the United States and North Korea, have produced no results and been "basically a cover."
Kerry has said the six-party talks should continue but also allow for direct contacts between the United States and North Korea on a range of issues to bring stability to the Korean peninsula.
The multilateral discussions, which were last convened in June, were due to resume this month. But the North Koreans have been balking until reports over South Korea's own past nuclear experiments have been clarified.
The Bush administration spearheaded the talks after the breakdown of a 1994 initiative launched under Bill Clinton to build two light-water reactors for North Korea in return for a freeze on development of military-use materiel.
McClellan defended the approach Monday: "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," he said.
He said 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."
But despite repeated prodding by reporters, McClellan did not point to any tangible signs of progress under Bush towards dismantling North Korea's nuclear programs.