North Korea said the six-way talks recently concluded in Beijing had been used to force it to disarm and dismissed the meeting as "not only useless but harmful in every aspect." "Betraying our expectation, the talks turned out to be no more than armchair arguments and degenerated into a stage show to force us to disarm," North Korea's foreign ministry spokesman said Saturday. "We are now more convinced than before that we have no other alternatives but to continue strengthening our nuclear deterrence as a self-defensive measure to protect our sovereignty," he was quoted as saying by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) monitored here. "We have come to lose all interests and expectations in these talks, which are not only useless but harmful in every aspect," the spokesman said. He said the United States had not only urged North Korea to move first and abandon its nuclear program but insisted on putting other issues on the table -- including the North's missile development and exports, conventional weapons and human rights in return for normalizing ties between the two countries. "These amount to a robber's demand, which is worse than the earlier one that we must drop our nuclear program first," his statement said. "What we have proposed is that we lay down weapons at the same time and co-exist peacefully." All that was made clear at the three days of talks was that the United States would not budge from its hard-line policy towards Pyongyang and had no intention of improving ties, he added. Three days of discussions on the Korean nuclear issue ended inconclusively Friday, although the participants -- North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia -- agreed more talks were needed. No date was set, however. **PHOTO CAPTION*** A North Korean soldier walks past a fisherman opposite Dandong, on China's border with North Korea Saturday, Aug. 30, 2003. (AP Photo)