No Aid to North Korea Until Nuclear Crisis Ends: Roh

South and North Korea have been divided since the end of World War II and are technically at war since an armistice, and not a peace treaty, ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

"We have a policy to support the North Korean economy and help it stand on its feet," President Roh Moo-hyun said during a visit to Germany on April 12. The South Korean presidential Blue House provided the text of Roh's comments the following day.

"But the North Korean nuclear problem must be resolved for substantive assistance to be possible," he told German leaders.

The capitalist South is more than 30 times as prosperous as the communist North and twice as populous.

"The South Korean people will probably not object, even before unification, to taking on the cost of ensuring the success of North Korea's economic reform and opening," he said.

But South Korea did not believe unification could be realized soon, he said. South Korea believes the North's economy must grow substantively before the two Koreas can merge.

Skeptics in South Korea of unification with the North have cited the cost to be as high as $1.8 trillion, by some estimates, of merging the two economies. They have said unification could break the South's economy - the third-largest in Asia - and put an end to decades of development.

On Feb 10, North Korea said it possessed nuclear weapons and was dropping out of six-party talks aimed at ending its nuclear ambitions in return for economic assistance and security guarantees.

There has been little progress in three rounds of the talks that began in August 2003 to end the North's nuclear programs.

Germany has failed to meet European Union's budget deficit ceilings in part because of unification costs, which amounts to 4 percent of Europe's largest economy's GDP.