N. Korea Offers U.S. a Deal

North Korea said today it was willing to end production and testing of nuclear weapons in return for political and economic concessions from the United States.

The regime called its offer “bold and magnanimous” in a statement released over its official news service.

Although the proposal was substantially the same as one made last month -- and rejected by the Bush administration -- it appeared to signal that the isolated and impoverished nation is increasingly anxious to cut a deal.

The offer came the day that an unofficial delegation of five prominent Americans, including a leading nuclear expert, was scheduled to arrive in the capital, Pyongyang, on a five-day visit to North Korea.

The delegation has requested a tour of the country’s largest nuclear complex, located at Yongbyon. If permission is granted, the visit would be the first to the controversial site since United Nations nuclear inspectors were expelled a year ago. Delegation members, interviewed Monday night by telephone in Beijing, cautioned that the trip to Yongbyon had not yet been approved by the North Korean government.

“We are hoping we can do some good, but we don’t know yet,” said Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory.

Other members of the delegation include Charles L. Pritchard, former State Department point man on North Korea and now an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the North Korean crisis; John W. Lewis, a professor emeritus of Chinese politics at Stanford University; and two Senate aides.

The delegation does not have the formal backing of the administration, but it hopes to smooth the way for official talks. The United States -- along with China, Japan, South Korea and Russia -- has tried for several months to schedule another round of six-party talks over the North Korea nuclear issue. A round in August ended inconclusively.

South Korean officials said today that the next round probably would not happen until February or March at the earliest but that negotiations were continuing behind the scenes.

“There is no particular movement to set a date for talks,” said Wi Sung Lac, a Foreign Ministry official.

Much of the negotiating concerns the timing of U.S. and North Korean concessions. The Bush administration insists that North Korea not be rewarded until it verifiably and irreversibly dismantles its nuclear weapons. North Korea, however, wants the lifting of economic sanctions, removal from the U.S. list of “terror-sponsoring” nations and energy aid before it would freeze its nuclear program.

In today’s statement, the regime said it was “set to refrain from test and production of nuclear weapons and stop even operating nuclear power industry for a peaceful purpose as first-phase measures of the package solution.”