N. Korea, U.S. hold 2nd round of bilateral nuclear talks

GENEVA (Yonhap News) -- North Korea and the United States on Monday started a second round of bilateral talks in less than three months to see whether the North is indeed prepared to take concrete steps toward denuclearization before the stalled six-nation negotiations can resume.

While South Korea and the U.S. consider the discussions “exploratory,” they remained cautious, with the North showing no signs of accepting terms set by Seoul and Washington for a resumption of the six-party talks.

North Korea’s delegation represented by Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan began the discussions, scheduled to continue into Tuesday, with the U.S. team headed by outgoing special envoy for North Korea Stephen Bosworth and his successor, Glyn Davies, at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Geneva, a diplomatic source here said.

The U.S. team also included Clifford Hart, the new chief negotiator to the six-party talks, according to the source.

Bosworth held talks with the North Korean envoy in New York in late July, in which the U.S. laid out a set of initial steps North Korea should take for the resumption of the nuclear talks.

Seoul and Washington have insisted, among other prerequisites, that Pyongyang halt its uranium enrichment program and allow U.N. inspectors back into the country before resuming the multilateral talks.

In a sign that a resumption of the six-party talks is unlikely to be in the offing, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il said last week that Pyongyang is ready to return to the nuclear talks “without any preconditions.”

North Korea quit the talks, which also involve China, Russia and Japan, in April 2009 and staged its second nuclear test a month later. But it has since repeatedly expressed its desire to return to the negotiating table without preconditions.

Adding new urgency to resuming the six-party talks, North Korea revealed in November that it is running an industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility. Highly enriched uranium can be used to make weapons, providing Pyongyang with a second way of building nuclear bombs in addition to the existing plutonium program.