Rice to press North Korean envoy on nukes

SINGAPORE - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has begun talks with Asian officials in Singapore before meeting North Korea's top diplomat in what will be the Bush administration's highest-level contact with the communist state in four years.

Amid promising developments in the international effort to get the North to abandon nuclear weapons, Rice is hoping to gauge the North's commitment to the process when she sees North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun on Wednesday on the sidelines of an Asian security forum in Singapore.

Pyongyang has been given a four-page draft document detailing what the United States says it must do to prove it has told the truth about its past atomic programs, a key element in the six-nation denuclearization initiative.

Diplomats expect Pak to provide at least an initial response to the proposal at the meeting with Rice and the foreign ministers of the other four nations involved: China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

"It will give some indication of the amount of effort the North Koreans have put into completing this verification protocol," chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said late Tuesday.

The draft calls for intrusive inspections of North Korean nuclear facilities, soil sampling, interviews with key scientists and a role for U.N. atomic experts. Hill travels on Friday to the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna to brief them on developments.

Hill said the goal is to reach a formal agreement on the document by mid-August after negotiations on the fine points, some of which the North Koreans have already objected to.

"They made some preliminary comments and indicated some problems with it," he said. "But we have to see what their considered comments back from the capital are."

South Korea's main nuclear envoy Kim Sook said Tuesday that: "The ball is actually in the North Korean court because they already received the draft of the verification protocol."

If Pyongyang agrees to the proposal, it would lead to the start of a key process of checking if the North turned in a correct account of its nuclear activity and facilities last month in a step toward their dismantlement and eventual abandonment.

Verification is expected to take months to finish and the Bush administration is eager to make quick progress in its last six months in office.

Officials, including Rice, who will be meeting a North Korean foreign minister for the first time, have played down chances of any breakthrough at Wednesday's meeting, which has been organized by China as an informal session.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, though, that the gathering "will be very good for advancing the agenda of the talks."

Rice says she plans to deliver "a very strong message" that the process "really needs to be completed, and that it has to be a verification protocol that can give us confidence."

She has refused to describe the meeting as an historic or landmark event, it will be the Bush administration's highest-level contact since 2004 with North Korea, a charter member of the president's "axis of evil."

It comes amid positive developments in the six-nation effort to get the North to denuclearize. The campaign began in 2003, but then stalled and gained steam only after Pyongyang detonated an atomic device in 2006.

In June, North Korea submitted a long-delayed list of its nuclear programs involving plutonium, but it did not include details about nuclear weapons, an alleged uranium enrichment program and possible nuclear proliferation with country's such as Syria.

Rice made clear that those concerns still have to be addressed if progress is to continue. "We [need] a way to address proliferation as well as all nuclear programs, including highly enriched uranium," she said.

Still in return for its steps, Washington announced it would remove the North from its terrorism blacklist and relaxed some economic sanctions on the communist nation. That led Pyongyang to blow up the cooling tower at its main nuclear reactor.