WASHINGTON, Oct 21: The United States on Friday reaffirmed its commitment to protect South Korea with nuclear weapons and sought Seoul’s help in a US-led multinational effort to curb weapons flows to North Korea.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld hosted South Korean Defence Minister Yoon Kwang-ung for annual talks against the backdrop of a US-led diplomatic campaign to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions in the wake of the Oct 9 underground atomic test by the Communist state.

“Secretary Rumsfeld offered assurances of firm US commitment and immediate support to the (Republic of Korea), including continuation of the extended deterrence offered by the US nuclear umbrella, consistent with the Mutual Defence Treaty,” said a US official, quoting a communique to be issued later on Friday.

The official said the language on US nuclear guarantees to South Korea was largely unchanged since 1978, when the assurances were extended under the defence pact, signed in 1953 at the end of the three-year Korean War.

South Korean officials were quoted in their country’s media as seeking more detailed nuclear guarantees. But the US official said the current wording “says all we need to say.”

Rumsfeld told reporters that he had asked South Korea to join the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative, a program launched in 2003 to interdict dangerous weapons from North Korea, Iran and other states of concern.

“We’ve expressed the hope that they will decide to participate,” Rumsfeld said, adding that recent nuclear moves by North Korea and Iran underscored the need to act.

South Korea, in a bid to maintain its 6-year-old reconciliation process with North Korea, has declined so far to join the 70-nation initiative.

Officials have said Seoul is studying some activities conducted under the initiative, and South Korea has pledged to observe UN Security Council sanctions imposed after the test.

“If there wasn’t a compelling reason for the Republic of Korea to be a (Proliferation Security Initiative) participant prior to the recent events in North Korea and the sanctions, there certainly is a compelling reason now,” said the Pentagon official, paraphrasing Rumsfeld’s request to Yoon.

US and South Korean officials met on Friday to try to close gaps over when South Korea will recover wartime command of its troops from the United States.

The United States has proposed that South Korea take over wartime control of its troops in 2009, three years before Seoul’s target of 2012. South Korea ceded wartime command to U.S-led UN forces during the 1950-1953 Korean war and assumed peacetime command over its troops in 1994.

The United States has about 30,000 troops in South Korea to support the South’s 650,000 soldiers, who face North Korea’s 1.2-million-strong army.

The two Koreas remain technically at war because the Korean war ended in truce instead of a peace treaty.

—Reuters