U.S., North Korea Hold Nuclear Talks

UNITED NATIONS - The United States opened discussions July 28 with North Korea, in a move testing Pyongyang's willingness to negotiate giving up its nuclear arsenal.

The U.S. special envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, greeted North Korea's first vice foreign minister Kim Kye Gwan at the entrance to the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York before they set the talks underway.

Neither side many any comment before the meetings, which were expected to go on into July 29. The United States has stressed however that these are "exploratory talks" to see if the Pyongyang regime is serious about living up to past commitments on its nuclear program.

The United States considers progress on disarmament to be key to any hopes of improving six decades of hostile U.S.-North Korea ties.

It is the first talks since Bosworth visited Pyongyang in December 2009.

The invitation to New York was made after a meeting between nuclear envoys from North and South Korea at an Asian security forum in Indonesia last week.

The international community is anxious to see North Korea return to six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons, which broke down in late 2008.

North Korea agreed in principle at the six-nation talks in 2005 to scrap its weapons program, but staged nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.

The North's disclosure in November that it had a uranium enrichment plant, adding a new means to produce atomic weapons, has become a new complicating factor in the talks the North has held with the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invited the North Korea minister for what she called "exploratory talks."

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said July 27 that the Indonesia meeting had been "constructive" but that the communist state needs to do more.

"What we're looking for is in our mind a clear indication that North Korea is serious about moving forward," Toner told reporters.

The United States will be watching to see if the North will recommit to the 2005 agreement "as well as take concrete and irreversible steps towards denuclearization," Toner said.

The North highlighted its mistrust of U.S. motives ahead of the talks.

At a U.N. debate on disarmament on Wednesday, the North's U.N. ambassador said a proposed U.S. missile defense shield in Europe would spark a "new nuclear arms race."

The ambassador, Sin Son Ho, said the United States was seeking "absolute nuclear superiority" and had no "moral justifications" to lecture other countries about proliferation.

North Korea's official news agency said in a commentary July 27, however, that an agreement with the United States formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War could become a "first step" to peace on the Korean peninsula and "denuclearization."

Diplomats have warned that the North is unlikely to make concessions in the talks.

"North Korea is in trouble again. It needs food supplies and its economy is falling deeper and deeper into crisis," an Asian diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

"But it cannot afford to give up the nuclear weapons, which are its main bargaining point."

In a sign of the diplomatic minefield that the United States has been going through in its dealings with North Korea in the past six decades, an aide accompanying Bosworth was seen carrying a copy of "How Enemies Become Friends," a recent book by Charles Kupchan, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, into the meeting.

Kupchan champions the cause of U.S. engagement with its enemies in the book.