North Korea Agrees to Meet Top U.N. Nuclear Inspectors

North Korean officials agreed Saturday to meet senior U.N. nuclear inspectors and discuss plans for monitoring spent reactor fuel that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.

In a statement released at its Vienna headquarters, the International Atomic Energy Agency said North Korea had sent a telex expressing “readiness to receive an agency consultation team.”

The IAEA statement said a team of “senior safeguards officials” is expected to arrive Tuesday in North Korea for the talks.

But there was no guarantee that the north will meet the agency’s demands to take samples from the spent fuel. The IAEA, an arm of the United Nations, insists on the inspections to determine whether any fuel has been diverted to produce plutonium, a key ingredient for atomic bombs.

IAEA officials had said Thursday that they planned to notify the U.N. Security Council that North Korea was in “serious violation” of a nuclear safeguards agreement, raising the possibility of sanctions.

Suspicions that the north is making nuclear arms deepened recently when it began removing spent fuel from an experimental reactor without inspectors present. North Korea contends its nuclear program is strictly non-military.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry said Friday in Washington that the north had allowed U.N. inspectors to verify that no such diversion had taken place.

Perry stressed that inspectors must now be permitted to conduct a technical analysis of the fuel rods removed from the reactor. Otherwise, it cannot be determined for certain that fuel was not diverted in the past.

The IAEA also wants North Korea to commit itself to allowing the inspectors to monitor the rest of the fuel removal process, which apparently began last weekend and is expected to last two more months.

On Saturday, North Korea defended its decision to begin replacement of the fuel rods and brushed off criticism of the move from the United States and the IAEA.

The official Rodong Shinmun newspaper, in a dispatch monitored in Tokyo, said the refueling is “an inevitable consequence of the breakup of the DPRK (North Korea)-U.S. talks by the United States and nobody can decry it in view of technical safety.”

Pyongyang also took a swipe at the IAEA, saying it declined to send inspectors to the initial refueling because of North Korea’s refusal to allow them to keep some of the replaced fuel rods.