South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak offered North Korea a "grand bargain" to give up its nuclear program in return for aid and security guarantees, warning Pyongyang the proposal may be its last chance.

The conservative leader, speaking in New York ahead of a United Nations summit, criticized the approach of past six-nation talks on North Korea as doing little but rewarding the communist state's bad behavior.

"We must have a comprehensive and integrated approach to fundamentally resolve the North Korea nuclear issue," Lee said at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Through the six-party talks, North Korea would first dismantle the key elements of its nuclear program and then we would provide security guarantees and international assistance. This is what I call a grand bargain," he said.

"This is the only way for North Korea to ensure its own survival," he said. "No country would be hostile to them and they would be welcomed by the international community."

"North Korea must not throw away what may be its last chance," he warned.

The nuclear program should be tackled as top priority

Pressed on what he meant, Lee acknowledged: "I think this may be their last chance, but perhaps the North Koreans wouldn't think so."

His proposal follows the general outline of the six-nation talks, under which North Korea agreed in 2007 to halt its nuclear program in return for badly-needed oil along with promises on its security.

But North Korea this year renounced the agreement —which involved China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States —and incurred new sanctions with a range of provocative steps including a nuclear test.

In recent weeks, however, North Korea has signaled a new openness to resuming talks. On Friday, Chinese state media said North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il told an envoy from Beijing he was willing to engage in new dialogue.

Lee, who is reviled by the North for his tougher approach than his predecessors, said that 20 years of diplomacy with the North Koreans had focused only on intermediate goals and "compensated them for not keeping their promises."

"We did not touch the fundamental issue, which is the complete dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear program," Lee said.

Lee said that the world should tackle North Korea's nuclear program as the top priority, saying that other concerns such as Pyongyang's dismal human rights record and its possible stockpiles of biological weapons could come later.

"Grand bargain"

Elsewhere in New York, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met separately with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea, Katsuya Okada and Yu Myung-Hwan, for talks on North Korea and a range of other issues.

Despite Lee's call for a "grand bargain," a senior US official said that the allied nations still held out hopes for incremental steps with North Korea.

"The point that we tried to make was how careful that we need to be at this juncture," said Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia.

"What were trying to get is the North Koreans to make small, but fundamental steps so that we can at least take some early actions going forth," he said.

President Barack Obama, in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN, held out guarded hope for progress on North Korea, believing that international pressure was persuading Pyongyang to adopt a more constructive approach.

"I think that North Korea is saying to itself, 'We can't just bang our spoon on the table and somehow think that the world's going to react positively. We've got to start behaving responsibly,'" Obama said.

AFP