Delegates led by special envoy Stephen Bosworth are due to visit Pyongyang on Tuesday in a bid to bring North Korea back to the negotiations it bolted from in April after a UN censure over a long-range rocket launch.

"We obviously hope that Ambassador Bosworth's visit is successful in persuading the North Koreans to return to the six-party talks and work toward the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and a new set of relationships with us and our partners," the chief US diplomat told reporters.

A senior US official told reporters earlier that the decision to send Bosworth to Pyongyang came after signs the North Koreans "may be more open to re-engage in the six-party talks than their initial statements" suggested.

North Korea had described the talks as dead.

The official said the indications came from China, which chairs the talks and has twice sent senior officials to Pyongyang, and from former US president Bill Clinton, who went there to win the release of two American journalists.

The indications also came from South Korea, which received a North Korean delegation for the April funeral of South Korean leader Kim Dae-Jung, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Bosworth's visit is not intended to be a "lengthy bilateral engagement," but rather to determine North Korea's intentions, the official said during a telephone conference call.

"The purpose of their mission is to determine whether the North Koreans are ready and willing to return to the six-party talks and return to a serious discussion of the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," the official said.

"He is definitely not carrying additional inducements," the official said, when asked if Bosworth would present new incentives to bring the North Koreans back to the talks.

"We've said from the beginning... that we don't intend to reward North Korea simply for going back to doing something it had previously committed to do," he said.

He added that the other partners in the talks with North Korea -- Russia, China, South Korea and Japan -- agreed with this approach.

"The easiest answer is for the North to simply to make clear that it is ready to resume those talks, and then we would expect the chair would reconvene the talks," he said when asked if there is a US proposal to restart the talks.

"If they have other specific ideas or modalities about restarting the talks, we would obviously listen to them as long as it's clear that the intention was to rejoin the talks and reaffirm the basic principles under which the talks have taken place," he said.

The principles are enshrined in a 2005 statement in which North Korea agreed to scrap its nuclear program and return to the Non-Proliferation Treaty in return for security and diplomatic guarantees and energy aid.

Share This Article With Planet Earth

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Related Links
Learn about nuclear weapons doctrine and defense at SpaceWar.com
Learn about missile defense at SpaceWar.com
All about missiles at SpaceWar.com
Learn about the Superpowers of the 21st Century at SpaceWar.com

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News