News reports had raised hopes that tension was easing after North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was quoted as telling Chinese envoy Tang Jiaxuan that he planned no further tests following the detonation of a device on Oct. 9 that shocked the world.
The Japanese news agency Kyodo said on Sunday that Kim had expressed his intention of honouring a 1992 declaration for the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula during talks with Tang, saying it was a "dying instruction" of his father -- the country's late leader, Kim Il Sung.
But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, heading home after a whirlwind tour of Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Moscow, cast doubt on the report, saying Pyongyang was bent on escalating the crisis.
"Tang did not tell me that Kim Jong-il either apologised for the test or said that he would not ever test again," Rice said.
"The Chinese did not, in a fairly thorough briefing to me, say anything about an apology. The North Koreans, I think, would like to see an escalation of the tension."
South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted an unidentified diplomatic source in Beijing as saying Kim had told the former Chinese foreign minister that Pyongyang would resume the six-country talks if Washington ended its financial sanctions.
But Rice said these curbs would remain and she questioned their commitment to resuming talks.
"The financial measures are a legal process which has to do with counterfeiting money. The (US) president has made very clear at every turn that he is going to defend the US currency," Rice said.
North Korea has boycotted the talks, which bring together the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China, because of Washington's financial restrictions.
FLEXIBLE ATTITUDE
China's Xinhua news agency quoted Tang as saying the United States should take a more flexible attitude towards North Korea, a view which Russia echoed on Saturday.
"Settling financial problems in relations between the United States and North Korea would have considerable importance in creating conditions for the resumption of the talks," Russia's Interfax news agency quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as telling the Kuwaiti news agency in an interview.
Russia was the last stop on Rice's five-day trip to rally support for UN economic and weapons sanctions, imposed a week ago to punish Pyongyang for its underground test.
Little emerged from her talks on Saturday evening with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but on Sunday a Japanese newspaper said Tokyo planned to monitor ships heading to North Korea in waters off its western and southern coasts.
Tokyo was considering deploying several destroyers and patrol aircraft to the two areas to conduct warning and surveillance activities, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
But Rice won few commitments from China and South Korea on implementing sanctions on their impoverished neighbour.
China is seen as having the greatest potential leverage but fears instability and a potential wave of refugees should sanctions prompt North Korea's collapse.
Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency said on Saturday that US pressure for sanctions, backed by Japan and South Korea, was aimed at suffocating the country.
"This development is pushing the situation to the worst phase of confrontation and the eve of war," it said. "The army and people ... are fully ready to become human bullets and bombs in defending Korean-style socialism, their dignity and life."
Assistant US Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who accompanied Rice on her North Asia tour, was in Hong Kong on Sunday for briefings by consulate staff on the freezing of North Korean funds, a consulate spokesman said.
Last year, the US Treasury Department said Macau's Banco Delta Asia was involved in illicit North Korean activities and it froze some $20 million of the North's funds in the bank.

Copyright Reuters, 2006