North Korea is not a potential target for a US-led military strike despite the country saying it has a nuclear weapons programme, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has insisted.
Asked whether North Korea could expect to be attacked in the same way as Iraq, Mr Straw stressed: "No, and I hope that nobody does."
The foreign secretary was speaking as three days of talks between the US, North Korea and China ended on Friday amid mutual recriminations.
"
There is nobody in the Korean peninsula ... who is going to benefit from any kind of nuclear arms race
"
Jack Straw
US officials say North Korea has admitted having nuclear weapons and might test, export or use them, but Pyongyang claims it presented a new proposal to resolve the dispute, but this was ignored.
Mr Straw said he hoped the world would be "very patient" with North Korea because "we have in no sense exhausted diplomatic processes here".
Stability needed
"There have been many threats from North Korea, many of them have not actually been fulfilled," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"The good news is that there is now an architecture which North Korea and the US are in negotiations under the auspices of negotiations led by China.
"Let us hope these can proceed. There is nobody in the Korean peninsula, on either side of it, who is going to benefit from any kind of nuclear arms race.
"Every country in that region, and particularly Russia, China and Japan, as well as the two Koreas, want there to be a stable North Korea, able to live in peace and harmony with its neighbours.
"It's in the interests of all those countries and the US to ensure that that can happen."
Mr Straw contrasted the threat posed by Iraq and that posed by North Korea as depending "on capacity and intent".
He dismissed claims that there had been "impetuosity in the decision" to take military action against Iraq.
UN's 'vital role'
Mr Straw welcomed news that former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz had been taken into custody by coalition forces.
He said he should provide important information about the Iraqi regime.
Mr Straw said his gut feeling was that Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq, saying it would be hard for him to escape abroad unrecognised.
Mr Straw seemed to stand back from Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon's suggestion that the United Nations may be sidelined in the search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
On Thursday, Mr Hoon said another country outside the coalition - but with the appropriate laboratory facilities to analyse particular chemicals and pre-cursors for nerve agents - could be used to verify WMD.
But Mr Straw stressed: "What I hope very much is that we can ensure that the UN has that vital role that President Bush and our Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke about ... and that would include an important role for Unmovic (weapons inspections)."
Former Commons leader Robin Cook, who quit over the Iraq war, earlier said he had been "perplexed" to hear Mr Hoon's suggestion that the UN would not be involved in weapons inspections.
"I understood the position of the British government is that we would support the return of the UN inspectors and personally, I cannot see a single reason why we should not do so," he told Today.
Mr Cook said he thought one of the government's objectives was to restore the credibility of the UN's authority, which had been "marginalised" at the beginning of the conflict with Iraq.
The UN was the body that had "international respectability" and a "unique authority" and "should be allowed back into Iraq as soon as possible".
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