US envoy Christopher Hill said on Monday talks on scrapping North Korea's nuclear weapons programme had overcome an impasse over frozen bank accounts and now needed to map out steps towards disarmament.
Assistant Secretary of State Hill said a dispute over North Korean accounts frozen in Macau's Banco Delta Asia (BDA) could be called closed after the US Treasury announced on Monday that $25 million would be released to Pyongyang.
Six-party nuclear talks in Beijing now had to focus on how to "disable" North Korea's Yongbyon reactor after it is shut as part of an initial disarmament deal, and also to decide the nuclear secrets the North must reveal as disarmament deepens, Hill told reporters after the first day of the talks.
"We would like to begin to sequence events for the next phase, which involves the complete declaration plus the disabling of their nuclear facilities," Hill said.
The talks that bring together North and South Korea, the United States, host China, Japan and Russia agreed on February 13 to give North Korea 60 days to shut the Yongbyon reactor, which makes plutonium that can be used for weapons, in return for energy aid and security pledges. Now negotiators are looking to decide what happens after that mid-April deadline, Hill said.
The US envoy said that next steps could be nettlesome, especially those involving the secretive North's role in highly enriched uranium (HEU) technology, which can be used to make the explosive core of nuclear weapons without running a tell-tale reactor.
North Korea has denied enriching uranium. US officials have recently steered away from the Bush administration's earlier claims that Pyongyang was close to mastering the complex process. Hill said Pyongyang needed to tell all, including dealings with other countries, to settle such issues. "What I want to see is more clarity on the next phase, because the next phase is very important, because then we go to the full declaration," Hill said. "Full means full, so there has to be some real clarity, understanding, on where we are in HEU."
Another possible sore point in the talks, Hill said, were strains between Pyongyang and Tokyo, which has so far resisted giving aid to North Korea as part of the disarmament deal. Japan says North Korea must answer concerns about Japanese citizens spirited away by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s. "I think the DPRK needs to do more to address its relationship with Japan," Hill said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The disarmament talks resumed after the North's October 2006 nuclear test drew international condemnation and UN sanctions. North Korea has not openly said it considers the bank dispute over. The accounts were frozen by Macau, a self-administered enclave under Chinese sovereignty, after Washington said BDA was harbouring North Korean criminal earnings.
A Japanese delegate said the North had insisted that it would shut down the Yongbyon nuclear complex only once it had its hands on the funds, which must first be released by Macau and then transferred via a Chinese bank.