The famously calm Obama is facing one of the first major foreign policy setbacks of his presidency, in which he has pledged a new focus on diplomacy and reached out to such longtime US foes as Iran and Syria.

The administration had also had held out hope of reviving six-way talks with North Korea. But Pyongyang made good on threats to quit in retaliation for US-led criticism by the United Nations of Pyongyang's rocket test over Japan.

"We will never again take part in such talks and will not be bound by any agreement reached at the talks," a North Korean foreign ministry statement said Tuesday.

But Charles Pritchard, the US negotiator with North Korea when the six-party talks began in 2003, said it was premature to consider the process dead and buried.

"In the final analysis, you've got to go back to a not too long ago James Bond film -- 'Never Say Never,'" said Pritchard, now president of the Washington-based Korea Economic Institute.

But six-way talks "certainly will be on a more extended hiatus and that could last for quite a number of months, maybe even a year," he told AFP.

Pritchard said that North Korea may have calculated that the Obama administration will negotiate with them bilaterally -- as long sought by Pyongyang.

Negotiators from the previous George W. Bush administration met one-on-one with North Korea but insisted that any agreement had to come through the six-nation talks, which also involve China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

The talks in 2007 led to a disarmament-for-aid deal, which has been stalled for months as the United States pushed for North Korea to verify its disarmament.

"The question now is when would the administration respond -- hopefully not too soon, but at some point in the future it will be appropriate to re-engage them bilaterally. You've got to do that anyway to get people back into the talks," Pritchard said.

Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs asked North Korea to end its "provocative threats" and called its withdrawal from the six-party talks "a serious step in the wrong direction."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized North Korea's expulsion of nuclear inspectors as an "unnecessary response."

But the United States also called on North Korea to return to six-way talks and refrained from more strongly worded criticism.

"There are times for rhetoric; there are times when rhetoric doesn't really help advantage your interests," a senior US official said on condition of anonymity.

John Bolton, a US ambassador to the United Nations under Bush and leading hardliner on North Korea, said that further talks would only give Pyongyang the chance to extract more concessions.

But Bolton, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, predicted that the Obama administration would try to breathe "eternal life" into the six-nation talks despite North Korea's walkout.

"The six-way talks were futile at the beginning, futile today and futile in the future and this later temper tantrum is just another brick in the wall. But I think the administration will be undeterred," Bolton told AFP.

"My view has been for a long time that the North Koreans are never going to be talked out of their nuclear weapons," he said. "I don't think there is any real answer until Kim Jong-Il and his regime are deposed."

Peter Beck, a Korea expert at American University, said the United States and North Korea would inevitably need to talk, at least to secure the release of two US journalists -- Euna Lee and Laura Ling -- detained near the Chinese border last month.

But even if disarmament talks resume, the North Koreans could then press hard to undo agreements of recent years, Beck said.

"They have learned that they haven't really lost anything with the missile launch. They could get the Bush administration to back down and give them a big part of what they want and now they think they can do that with Obama," he said.

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