North Korea set on Thursday conditions for any talks with the United States or its neighbor, the South, including the withdrawal of UN sanctions and a guaranteed end to joint drills.

North Korea set on Thursday conditions for any talks with the United States or its neighbor, the South, including the withdrawal of UN sanctions and a guaranteed end to joint drills.

The list of demands, which came from the North's top military body, kicked off by insisting on a general apology for all "provocative acts" taken against North Korea up to now.

The first step demanded by the North's National Military Commission was the withdrawal of "cooked up" UN sanctions that were imposed after the nuclear test in February.

North Korea has repeatedly cited the sanctions as a prime trigger for the current crisis.

The other main bone of contention has been ongoing joint South Korea-US military drills, which have involved the deployment of nuclear-capable B-52s and B-2 stealth bombers.

Both countries must provide international guarantees that such "nuclear war drills" will never be repeated, the commission said.
"Dialogue and war games can never go together," it added.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged Pyongyang on Wednesday to "seriously" consider Seoul's offer.
The commission statement came just hours after the North's main body for inter-Korean relations ruled out any immediate return to the negotiating table.

The South's dialogue offer is a "deceptive artifice" designed to appease public opinion and to hide its responsibility for pushing the peninsula "to a state of war", the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said.