The North Korean nuclear standoff and China's military buildup will top US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's agenda when he travels to Southeast Asia early next month for an international security conference, a senior US defense official said.
Rumsfeld is scheduled to attend a two day conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore June 4-5, his first stop on a round the world trip that also will take him Thailand and then to Norway and Brussels for a meeting of NATO defense ministers, officials said.
"Unavoidably the Korean issue will be right in front of us," said the official, who briefed reporters about the trip on condition of anonymity.
North Korea's refusal so far to rejoin six party talks on its nuclear weapons program has sharpened tensions with Washington, which worries that Pyongyang may conduct its first nuclear test.
"The North Koreans appear to be on an escalatory ladder," the official told reporters. "We can't predict when the timing or timeline of that ladder is. We can't predict what the events on that ladder will be.
"But we're always concerned when they say things, because sometimes, or a lot of times, when they say they are going to do things, they actually do do them. And they have shown in the past a capacity to execute against the statement they have made," he said.
"But again absolutely no suggestion that anything is about to happen or will happen," he said.
Rumsfeld is expected to address the North Korean issue in a speech Saturday to the IISS conference in Singapore.
North Korea also will be "heavily featured" in Rumsfeld's bilateral meetings with counterparts on the sidelines of the conference, the official said.
He is expected to meet one on one with defense ministers from Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and possibly Pakistan and Mongolia, the official said.
The meeting with the South Koreans will come less than a week before a visit to Washington by South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun.
The official noted that Rumsfeld's meeting with Japanese defense chief Yoshinori Ono will be their first since February when the two countries declared Taiwan a common security concern, a declaration that infuriated China.
Rumsfeld is expected to address the issue of China's military modernization in his speech to the Singapore conference, which draws Asian defense ministers and other high level officials, as well as in his bilateral meetings.
China may send Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo, the official said. Dai was listed on one conference schedule as slated to give a speech on China's role in East Asia, he said.
China's growing spending on missiles, submarines, warships, fighters and advanced electronics and information systems has raised tensions over Taiwan, and concern here about its longer term implications for US forces in the western Pacific.
An annual Pentagon report on Chinese military power is due out soon and may provide the backdrop for Rumsfeld's comments.
The defense official said the report contains "no dramatic surpises" but will have a different format from previous years.
