The United States said on Friday that North Korea should dismantle its nuclear weapons programs and should not retain a civilian nuclear capability as well.

The remark came after Christopher Hill, top US envoy to the six-party talks currently being held in Beijing, suggested that Washington could be willing to allow the North the peaceful use of atomic power if the North rejoined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003.

"We don't challenge the fact that they have the rights to this under the treaty, but we challenge whether they should be exercising these rights," Hill told reporters in Beijing on Friday.

However, Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said on Friday that Hill was clear that the North should not be allowed to retain civilian nuclear capability.

"I think he was very clear and we're very clear that we do not think that North Korea should retain a civilian nuclear capability," McCormack said, stressing that the US goal is to achieve a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

"We've seen North Korea in terms of the 1991 agreement, the NPT, the 1994 Agreed Framework, in which they have not lived up to their nuclear obligations. So any nuclear program in North Korea could potentially be a nuclear weapons program," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency July 30, 2005)