IN REMARKS that will stir unease around East Asia, President Bush’s chief arms negotiator launched a bitter personal attack on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, even as foreign diplomats were attempting to lure the isolated state to the negotiating table.

John Bolton, the US Under-Secretary of State for arms control, described Mr Kim as a dictator, blackmailer and an extortionist, who pampers himself while his people starve.

The virulence of the attack, which follows a period of milder rhetoric from the US, indicates the ongoing struggle between hardliners and negotiators for control of the Bush Administration’s policy on North Korea.

“While he lives like royalty in Pyongyang, he keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps with millions more mired in abject poverty, scrounging the ground for food,” he told a gathering of scholars in the South Korean capital, Seoul. “For many in North Korea, life is a hellish nightmare.”

Mr Bush has made no secret of his personal distaste for the North Korean leader. As he told an interviewer last summer: “I loathe Kim Jong Il.”

The frankness of his remarks have caused exasperation among South Korean, Japanese and Asia-based US diplomats who have no disagreement with his harsh assessment of Mr Kim.

The problem is that, in a culture that places such emphasis on “face”, such direct abuse complicates the already difficult job of talking North Korea down from its nuclear weapons programme.

Last week, in an uncharacteristic utterance which was taken as a sign of hope, Mr Bush forced himself to refer to “Mr Kim Jong Il”.

But yesterday Mr Bolton dashed any hopes of an American charm offensive.

Defending his strong language, he said: “It is important to tell the truth and I think that being able to state clearly the concerns we have about the regime in North Korea is important internationally in explaining why we are concerned both about its own support for terrorism and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.”

For two weeks, diplomats in the US, China, South Korea and Japan have been hinting at an imminent breakthrough — the announcement of talks about North Korea’s nuclear programme in Beijing. These are expected to begin with a meeting of US and North Korean representatives, chaired by China, and to lead into broader multilateral talks including South Korea and Japan.

Yesterday Russia also threw its hat into the ring. According to the country’s foreign ministry, the North Korean Ambassador to Moscow has stated that he wants the talks to include Russia. Whether this will simplify or complicate progress towards the negotiating table is unclear.

But Mr Bolton’s language is unlikely to help.

The Under-Secretary of State is the most senior hawk in a State Department which, by and large, takes a softer line on North Korea than either the White House or the Pentagon. Many of the US’s senior Korea hands helped to craft the 1994 Agreed Framework, the Clinton Administration’s solution to the last North Korean nuclear scare, which is scorned by many in the Bush Administration.

The moderates favour some kind of negotiation with North Korea; they have been encouraged by the appointment of a Clinton-era veteran diplomat, Mitchell Reiss, as Colin Powell’s director of policy planning.

But yesterday they were firmly put in their place by Mr Bolton. “To enter into a similar type of arrangement again would simply postpone the problem for some future administration,” he said yesterday of the Agreed Framework.

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