The United States opened discussions Thursday with North Korea, in a move testing Pyongyang's willingness to negotiate giving up its nuclear arsenal. The US special envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, greeted North Korea's first vice foreign minister Kim Kye Gwan at the entrance to the US 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 Friday. 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 programme.
The United States considers progress on disarmament to be key to any hopes of improving six decades of hostile US-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 programme, 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. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton invited the North Korea minister for what she called "exploratory talks." State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Wednesday 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 US motives ahead of the talks. At a UN debate on disarmament on Wednesday, the North's UN ambassador said a proposed US missile defence 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 Wednesday 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."