Analysts said the visit was a positive sign the North remains interested in completing the disablement of its declared nuclear plants, despite the failure of talks in Beijing last month.

In Washington, outgoing US President George W. Bush on Monday branded the communist state as "still dangerous" and said it may be operating a secret uranium-based weapons programme.

The foreign ministry in Pyongyang, in an apparent message to the incoming Obama administration, reiterated it would not give up its nuclear weapons until the US drops its "hostile" policy and establishes diplomatic relations.

North Korea tested an atomic weapon in 2006 but the following year signed on to a six-nation aid-for-disarmament pact. As part of that agreement it is disabling the plants at Yongbyon which made weapons-grade plutonium.

The negotiations suffered a setback last month when negotiators could not agree ways to verify the North's declaration of its past atomic activities.

South Korea's foreign ministry said its deputy chief nuclear envoy Hwang Joon-Kook would lead a delegation of officials and nuclear technocrats that would arrive in Pyongyang on Thursday and travel on to Yongbyon.

South Korea has expressed interest in buying the rods for its nuclear power plants.

The team will check "technical and economic" aspects of possibly buying the rods, a ministry spokesman said. The North has declared 14,000 unused rods.

"This is a positive signal from North Korea," Dongguk University professor Kim Yong-Hyun told AFP. "It appears to be showing willingness to go ahead with the process of disabling its nuclear programme."

He said the visit, shortly before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the next US President on January 20, "is also seen as a message to Washington."

Kim Sung-Han, a nuclear expert at Korea University, agreed the trip should be regarded "positively, not negatively."

Hwang will be the most senior Seoul official to visit the North since relations soured in March, after South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak took office and promised a firmer line in relations.

The North has cut almost all official contacts with the South.

But Kim Yong-Hyun said Hwang's trip does not necessarily signal a thaw in inter-Korean relations.

The foreign ministry said the visit was agreed during the Beijing talks and the North recently accepted South Korea's proposal to send a delegation.

The talks group the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, Japan and host China.

Negotiations have not begun on the final phase of the 2007 pact, which calls for the scrapping of all nuclear weapons and material in return for aid, normalised ties between the North and the US and a formal peace pact.

"There will be no such case in 100 years' time that we will hand over our nuclear weapons first without the fundamental settlement of the US hostile policy toward Korea and its nuclear threat," the North's foreign ministry said late Tuesday in a statement.

It repeated demands for verification that US nuclear weapons have been withdrawn from South Korea. The US said this was done in the early 1990s.

"When the US nuclear threat is removed and South Korea is cleared of its nuclear umbrella, we will also feel no need to keep nuclear weapons," the statement said.

President Bush described the North as still a problem.

"There is a debate in the intelligence community about how big a problem they are. One of my concerns is that there might be a highly enriched uranium programme," he told a press conference.

"Therefore, it is very important that out of the six-party talks comes a strong verification regime."

North Korea has never admitted the existence of a highly enriched uranium programme, and US experts are unsure how developed it may be.

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