US in direct contact with North Korea

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 yesterday.

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 neighbour's behaviour 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 ask," he said. "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."

"We can talk to them, we do talk to them," he said.

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

But privately senior figures admit the military options do not look promising, with ally South Korea's densely populated capital Seoul in range of the North's artillery.

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.

But his efforts have been overshadowed by an extraordinary war of words, with Trump mocking Kim as "little Rocket Man" and Kim branding the US leader a "dotard".

Several North Korean missiles were recently spotted moved from a rocket facility in the capital Pyongyang, South Korea's Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) reported late Friday amid speculation that the North was preparing to take more provocative actions.

The report cited an unnamed intelligence source saying South Korean and U.S. intelligence officials detected missiles being transported away from North Korea's Missile Research and Development Facility at Sanum-dong in the northern part of Pyongyang.

The report did not say when or where they had been moved.