JOIN USThe US has applauded the statement by North Korea that it has no plans to conduct a nuclear test at present.
"Obviously we'll judge them by their actions, rather than their words," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was quoted as saying by Xinhua. "It's a good thing, obviously, that they are saying better things," she said at a regular news briefing.
"But we continue to call on them to fulfill their international obligations to refrain from any provocative activity, including provocative rhetoric with regard to their neighbours," she said.
"They should be bound by the terms of their UN obligations and by the talks that they entered into in 2005," Nuland said. The six-party talks involve North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the US over the denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said South Korea tried to "rattle the nerves of North Korea in a bid to cause it to conduct a nuclear test, though such a thing is not under plan at present", the country's official news agency KCNA reported.
On May 19, a declaration made by the Group of Eight (G8) summit in the US urged Pyongyang to abandon all nuclear and ballistic missile programmes in a "complete, verifiable, and irreversible manner" after North Korea's failed launch of an "earth observation" satellite in April. Responding to the declaration, Pyongyang said it had no plan to conduct nuclear tests alongside its "peaceful satellite development programme".
North Korea conducted two nuclear tests in October 2006 and May 2009, and were subsequently slapped with sanctions by the UN Security Council.