North Korea is a threat and one of the world's leaders in the proliferation of missile technology, U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday in Nice. "Obviously, a country that has a behaviour pattern that North Korea has, probably being one of the world's leading proliferants of missile technology, is a threat," Rumsfeld told journalists after an informal meeting of NATO defence ministers in the southern French resort city. He was reacting to North Korea's announcement that it possessed nuclear weapons and was pulling out of the six-nations talks on doing away with its nuclear arsenal. "One has to be concerned about it from a proliferation standpoint, if you believe they have nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld said, adding, "I do not know" if they do. Earlier Thursday, in Luxembourg, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged North Korean to take up negotiations by saying, "There is a path for the North Koreans that would put them in a more reasonable relationship with the rest of the world."
