nation disarmament talks and taking the issue to the Security Council. "We are willing, when the time is right, when we believe that we have exhausted the possibilities of the framework we are in, to go to the Security Council," Rice told U.S. network Fox News Channel while in Vilnius, Lithuania. "We will know when we've had the discussions with our allies and with our colleagues in the six-party talks about when it's time to do that." Japan's foreign minister also expressed regret Thursday over the stalled nuclear talks, and suggested it might be necessary to bring the issue to the U.N. Security Council. Nobutaka Machimura, in Jakarta to attend the Asian-African Summit, said the repeated delays have served only to benefit North Korea, which may have used the time to produce nuclear weapons. "This one-year period has been wasted. However, for North Korea, this may have been a very useful and productive period in that they could have been able to develop nuclear weapons," he said. "I believe the situation cannot be prolonged any further." South Korea confirmed this week that the North's 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon had been shut down, a sign that North Korea might be planning to reprocess spent fuel rods there to extract plutonium. As part of continuing diplomacy to resolve the standoff, the top U.S. envoy on the North Korea nuclear issue will visit South Korea twice this month, South Korea's Foreign Ministry said Thursday. Christopher Hill, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is also expected to visit China and Japan.
