Special envoy Ning Fuqui met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and other officials to set the pace for a working group meeting next week among China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, the United States and Russia to help end Pyongyang's nuclear drive.

"They discussed the progress of the six-party talks and the upcoming working group meeting beginning in Beijing on May 12th," US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

He said Ning would have further consultations with US Special Envoy for North Korea Joseph DiTrani, and also meet with James Kelly, the United States point man at the high-level six-party talks that China had been hosting to help resolve the nucler question.

The May 12 meeting in Beijing would help formalise the agenda for the third round of the six-party talks, which should be held by the end of June, officials have said.

The nuclear impasse erupted in October 2002 when Washington charged that North Korea had not kept its part of the bargain by breaking a 1994 nuclear freeze and launching a secret nuclear weapons program.

The United States said it had learned "conclusively" that the Stalinist state was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program based not on plutonium but on uranium enrichment.

Two rounds of six-way talks hosted by China have failed to narrow key differences on how to end the 18-month-old standoff.

Washington is demanding the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programs, both plutonium and enriched uranium, before it will offer concessions to the impoverished state.

Pyongyang denies it is running a uranium scheme, and says it is prepared to freeze its plutonium facilities in return for simultaneous rewards from the United States.

WAR.WIRE