N. Korea to Resume Nuclear Talks in Beijing

BEIJING, July 8 -- After a nine-month stall, China announced Tuesday that formal negotiations will resume this week on dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons program, including ways to verify its recent accounting of plutonium-based nuclear material.

The talks, which the Chinese Foreign Ministry said will begin Thursday in Beijing and last three days, mark the latest attempt to maintain momentum in the six-party negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and the means to produce them.

The start-and-stop talks, which have been under way for nearly five years under Chinese sponsorship, reached a milestone June 26 with a North Korean declaration outlining its plutonium-based nuclear program and acknowledging U.S. concerns about what may be a separate uranium-enrichment program and provision of nuclear assistance to Syria.

North Korea's report was filed six months late, and omitted much of the information originally demanded, but U.S. officials greeted it as a significant step forward. In return for the declaration, the Bush administration said it would drop North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and abolish some trade restrictions on the isolated Stalinist state.

Qing Gang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, qualified the exchange as "important progress" in the drawn-out six-party process.

The next step, U.S. officials said, is working out a schedule to verify North Korea's assertion that it has only 37 kilograms of plutonium and has destroyed the means to make more. Last month's televised blasting of a cooling tower at the Yongbyon reactor near Pyongyang was part of that process.

Ultimately, according to past six-party accords, the agreed goal is to have North Korea disclose and destroy its entire nuclear program, including whatever weapons may already have been produced.

North Korea pledged last October to do so. But it has balked in carrying out the pledge, saying fuel and other economic aid have failed to arrive as promised. Pyongyang also has refused to discuss U.S. suspicions of the separate uranium enrichment program. The announcement Tuesday left unclear when negotiators would approach that issue or seek answers about any stockpiled nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles that could deliver them.

Accepting the partial declaration June 26 and taking the reciprocal steps without insisting on a complete report marked a significant concession by the Bush administration, drawing criticism in Washington. But Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the main U.S. negotiator, said that shutting down the Yongbyon reactor and ending North Korea's plutonium-based nuclear development were alreadymajor accomplishments.

Responding to the critics, Hill pledged to keep pushing on the uranium enrichment doubts, the degree of North Korean help to Syria and a complete disclosure of North Korea's weapons production. But North Korea announced recently it would not move further until more of the 1 million tons of fuel promised last October actually lands in North Korean ports, and the trade benefits set in motion by President Bush on June 26 start to bear fruit.

Delegates from the six nations resuming talks Thursday -- North and South Korea, Japan, Russia, China and the United States -- were expected to approve a long list of technical verification steps, including inspections and interviews with North Korean scientists, likely to take weeks if not months to complete.

President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea said in an interview released Tuesday by his office that the process will take time because it is complicated and requires complete cooperation from the North Korean government. What Pyongyang has revealed so far, he added, is insufficient because it does not disclose the full extent of the weapons program.