Two days of private talks between diplomats of the US, Japan and South Korea over North Korea's nuclear ambitions opened here with officials keeping mum publicly.
"Aloha," was all James Kelly, assistant US secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, would say as he walked past a small group of reporters.
Thursday was devoted to bilateral talks between Kelly and South Korea's deputy foreign minister, Lee Soo-hyuck, followed by a meeting between Lee and Mitoji Yabunaka, director general of Japan's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau.
A bilateral session between Kelly and Yabunaka was scheduled for yesterday morning, to be followed by all three sides meeting. They were expected to issue a joint statement yesterday afternoon.
The closed-door meetings at the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort on Waikiki Beach by the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group are part of a regular series of meetings held about four times each year.
Besides the standoff over North Korea's claim to have a nuclear weapons program, the talks here were expected to include whether to continue providing key parts for a US-led project to build two nuclear reactors in North Korea.
The light-water reactors are the key element in a 1994 agreement in the US efforts to keep the Korean peninsula nuclear-free by replacing the North's Soviet-designed, graphite-moderated reactors, which experts say produce greater amounts of weapons-grade plutonium.
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