Former President Jimmy Carter said on Friday the Bush administration was partly responsible for North Korea's decision to test a nuclear device by isolating the Asian country, and he urged Washington to change course and talk with Pyongyang.
"Obviously most of the blame is on North Korea but it is US policies that have brought us to this status," he told Reuters while riding between campaign stops for his son Jack who is running for the US Senate in Nevada.
Carter, president from 1977 to 1981, negotiated a deal during a visit to North Korea in 1994 over the reclusive communist state's nuclear program when fellow Democrat Bill Clinton was president.
"The Bush administration changed that policy," he continued. "They put in the trash can the agreement with North Korea, and as a result of that -- and threatened North Korea with military attack -- and as a result of those threats and the discarding of the previous agreement, North Korea announced that they were withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty."
"It's like night and day. It was daytime when Clinton was in office that totally prohibited and prevented any sort of plutonium enrichment," he said. "All that was dramatically changed under George Bush and now we have the North Koreans having exploded a plutonium bomb."
Carter said he favoured resuming talks with North Korea.
"Unfortunately, the US government has established an unprecedented international policy of not talking to anyone who disagrees with us," he said.
Bush has rejected Democratic criticism of his North Korean policy and said direct talks with North Korea failed in the past, citing the North's violation of its 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration. Bush has pursued six-party talks in which the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia deal jointly with North Korea.