Washington has opened channels to North Korea to find out if the regime is ready to talk about giving up its nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Saturday.

His office in Washington quickly clarified that North Korea has shown no interest in such discussions.

Speaking after a day of talks with China‘s President Xi Jinping and top diplomats, Tillerson told reporters that US officials are in touch with Pyongyang.

The disclosure follows an escalating war of words between US President Donald Trump and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un, and Tillerson issued a call for calm.

Asked how he could know whether the North would even contemplate responding to new sanctions by coming to the table, the US envoy said: “We are probing, so stay tuned.”

Washington has no diplomatic ties with Kim’s autocratic regime, and has been leaning on Beijing to rein in its neighbor‘s behavior through tougher sanctions.

But Tillerson said US diplomats do not rely on China as a go-between in overtures to North Korea, and have themselves talked directly through “our own channels”.

“We have lines of communication with Pyongyang. We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout, we have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang,” he said.

In Washington, the State Department said that while such communications channels do exist North Korea has shown no interest in talking about giving up its nuclear weapons.

South Korea’s presidential office backed up the US State Department‘s statement, saying that Pyongyang has shown no signs that the regime is “interested in or prepared for” dialogue. 

“The governments of South Korea and the US are working closely together in maintaining channels of communication with North Korea,” Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Park Soo-hyun said, adding that the allies are working on the shared goal of bringing Pyongyang to talks through sanctions and pressure. 

“As stated by the US State Department, North Korea has shown no interest in serious dialogue.”
Park also said that the US has felt a need for “quiet communication” with the North to resolve humanitarian issues including the release of US citizens held captive by Pyongyang.

The US has not ruled out the use of force to compel Pyongyang to halt missile and nuclear tests, and Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” the country.

Tillerson, meanwhile, has been a proponent of a campaign of “peaceful pressure,” using US and UN sanctions and working with China to turn the screw on the regime, and welcomed recent measures taken by China to crack down on its neighbor.

While it has backed UN sanctions against Pyongyang, Beijing has insisted that the punitive measures must be coupled with efforts to organize peace talks. China has also maintained some trade with Pyongyang, fueling criticism that such actions were giving North Korea room to breathe under mounting international pressure.

However, faced with a recalcitrant Pyongyang and friction with Washington, Beijing has stepped up the pressure on North Korea, including the recent order on North Korean businesses in China to shut down as stated in the most recent UN Security Council resolution.

As China takes a tougher stance, North Korea appears to be looking to Russia for support.

According to North‘s Korean Central News Agency, director general of the North American department at the North Korean foreign ministry Choe Son-hui on Friday met with Oleg Burmistrov, Russia’s ambassador-at-large, to discuss issues surrounding North Korea.

“Choe stressed that it is necessary for the US to stop its hostile policy toward the DPRK in order to defuse tension and ensure peace and security in the Korean Peninsula and the Northeast Asian region,” the KCNA said. DPRK stands for the North‘s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Moscow is considered friendly toward its former communist ally, but the country voted in favor of recent UN Security Council resolutions condemning North Korea‘s nuclear and missile provocations. Moscow, however, was instrumental in keeping North Korea’s fuel supply open, being one of the countries that rejected the US’s push to impose a complete fuel embargo on the reclusive regime.

From news reports