Top US and North Korean nuclear negotiators will meet next week to try to break a deadlock in disarmament talks over how the North will account for its nuclear past.
US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill will hold the talks with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, on Tuesday in Singapore, US State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters on Friday. Hill will then travel to Beijing to report on the talks.
China, an ally of North Korea, has been the host of stalled six-nation disarmament talks.
Missed deadline
Pyongyang missed a Dec. 31 deadline to produce a nuclear inventory and full disclosure of it proliferation activities. While other work to disable a nuclear reactor has continued, the delayed document has soured the atmosphere of talks meant to shutter North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and improve the poor nation’s standing in the world.
Earlier on Friday, Hill said the standoff has gone on long enough.
“We don’t have a lot of time. We really need to move on,” Hill said in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The main sticking point is a dispute over what the North is required to reveal about nuclear know-how or material it may have passed or sold to other nations. The North has developed at least one nuclear program and tested a device before it began serious bargaining with the US, Russia and Asian neighbors.
The accounting is also supposed to deal with allegations that the North secretly worked to produce weapons-grade uranium, besides a nuclear plutonium program it has already revealed.
Casey said the US does not anticipate a final resolution to the matter at the meeting. But he said it was an important step to move the process forward.
The US does not expect that Hill will “be coming home with a declaration in his briefcase,” Casey said. “Certainly we hope to make continued progress on it, but I am not led to believe that there is any reason to suspect that this is a decisive point in those discussions.”
acceptable deal
Earlier, US officials had said Hill would not see his North Korean counterparts unless the issue of the accounting, or declaration, of its nuclear program was resolved.
The meeting is a sign that the US thinks it can strike a deal with the North to produce an acceptable declaration, and the North remains interested in the talks despite recent tension with the South.
North Korea test-fired a barrage of short-range missiles a week ago, in apparent response to the new South Korean government’s tougher stance on Pyongyang.
The North also threatened to turn South Korea to “ashes” in a pre-emptive strike, responding to remarks by South Korea’s top military officer that Seoul could target suspected North Korean nuclear sites if there were signs of a pending atomic attack.
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