A senior American diplomat plans to visit North Korea in the coming week in a bid to salvage a faltering international effort to get the communist country to give up nuclear weapons, U.S. officials said Saturday.
Christopher Hill, the chief American negotiator in the six-nation talks, will leave for South Korea on Monday and is expected to travel to the North shortly afterward amid growing concern the often-delayed disarmament negotiation is on the verge of collapse, the officials said.
U.S. and North Korean diplomats met last week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in a sign that talks are not entirely dead. Hill and a small team plan to continue those talks in the North Korean capital, an official said, but it is not clear that Hill is bringing a new proposal to break the latest impasse.
Hill also held strategy sessions last week with envoys from the other four nations that have offered the North economic and political rewards for giving up a nuclear stockpile believed to be equal to about six bombs, and the means to make more.
The U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia are trying to persuade North Korea not to return its main nuclear complex to working order. The five nations bargaining with the North also want it to accept a plan to verify that it has fully accounted for all past atomic activities _ the crux of the latest and potentially deal-killing impasse.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack confirmed that Hill would fly to Seoul, South Korea, on Monday. He would not comment on any other stops Hill might make.
Hill will meet with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Sook, on Tuesday, a South Korean official said Sunday in Seoul. The official spoke Sunday on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media about the matter.
Other U.S. officials said Hill intended to visit North Korea to try to revive the six-nation process that has deteriorated since August, when North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is believed to have suffered a stroke and his country edged closer to restarting the disabled nuclear reactor.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Hill's plans have not yet been announced and his mission in North Korea has not yet been fully defined. The Washington Post first reported on the travel plans on its Web site Saturday.
With U.S. and North Korean positions hardening in recent weeks, it would take a concession by one or both nations, or a face-saving compromise to get North Korea to again reverse course and resume dismantling the Yongbyon complex.
Even if talks resume quickly, no definitive progress toward ridding the Stalinist nation of its nuclear stockpile is expected before the close of the Bush administration. Many analysts assume the North is waiting out President George W. Bush in hopes that a new president would offer a better deal to buy out the North's crude but proven nuclear capability.
North Korea's foreign minister on Saturday warned that there would be "no progress" if all parties involved did not keep their promises.
Pak Ui Chun used his address to the U.N. General Assembly to outline his country's reasons for backtracking on its promise to disassemble its nuclear weapons program. He claimed that the U.S. had been "double-faced" and "unjust," and that it maintains a hostile stance toward the North.
"If the six parties are not true to their words in implementing respective obligations in the light of a great lack of trust with each other, no progress will be made at all," he said.
Earlier this past week, North Korea ordered U.N. nuclear monitors to leave the country and said it would reinsert nuclear material into the plutonium-processing plant within a week. South Korean officials say it would take the North three to four months to fully restore the plant.
That led Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to warn the country that restarting its nuclear program "would only deepen its isolation." The North exploded a nuclear device in 2006.
After several months of promising moves, including submitting a long-delayed accounting of its atomic activities and blowing up the cooling tower at Yongbyon in June, the North stopped disabling Yongbyon in August to protest Washington's refusal to remove it from a list of countries that sponsor terrorism.
The United States says North Korea won't be taken off the list until it agrees to the verification plan.
North Korea had agreed last year to begin disabling its nuclear system in exchange for energy aid and other concessions from the five nations it is negotiating with: China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.
On Friday, South Korea's foreign minister warned the North's moves toward restarting its nuclear plant could erase years of progress. "We are faced with a difficult situation where this (negotiation) is not moving forward and may go back to square one," Yu Myung-hwan said.
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AP Diplomatic Writer Anne Gearan in Washington and Associated Press writer Kwang-tae Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
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