North Korea Tells U.S. It Will Resume Talks

In an apparent policy reversal, North Korea has told the United States that it will return to international negotiations on abandoning its nuclear program, but did not say when, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

White House and State Department officials had urged North Korea to resume the long-stalled talks with the United States, South Korea, China, Russia and Japan as soon as possible.

At a meeting in New York on Monday requested by the North Koreans, the country’s U.N. ambassador told American diplomats that it was willing to participate again in the talks, U.S. officials said.

“The North Koreans said they would return to the six-party process, but did not give us a time certain when they would return,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

At the United Nations, Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya said the talks could resume within several weeks.

“I welcome it because my government has worked very hard to push the resumption of the six-party talks,” he said. “I am glad that now they agreed, and I assume that this will be resumed pretty soon, in the next few weeks.”

But some analysts said the North Korean pledge might be a stalling tactic.

“It’s certainly not a breakthrough by any definition,” said L. Gordon Flake, a North Korea specialist at the Washington-based Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington. “This is a vague statement designed to take the most immediate heat off.”

The last round of the negotiations were held in Beijing nearly a year ago. Despite months of diplomatic pressure from the United States and its allies to return to the table, the North Korean government in Pyongyang announced in February that it possessed nuclear weapons and would not resume negotiations.

In March, Pyongyang released a statement saying it would no longer discuss abandoning its nuclear programs, but, as a declared nuclear power, it would discuss mutual disarmament with the United States.

In April, South Korean officials said that North Korea had shut down its nuclear reactor, possibly to harvest fissile material for a warhead.

Pyongyang has also said that as a condition for the talks, the United States must drop its “hostile policy” toward North Korea. There was no indication Tuesday that North Korea had dropped that condition, or had blunted its refusal to discuss the unilateral nuclear disarmament that its neighbors had demanded, Flake noted.

The U.S. and North Korea have no formal diplomatic ties, so Washington occasionally uses what is known as “the New York channel,” conducting discussions with North Korean diplomats posted to the United Nations. The New York channel is mostly a way to talk about talks, not a way to conduct actual negotiations, said Richard Grenell, the spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations.

Monday’s meeting was the second between the two sides in about three weeks. The United States initiated the first meeting at the urging of its allies, who wanted the Bush administration to repeat in a private diplomatic channel its public statements of respect for North Korean sovereignty.

The second meeting took place at North Korea’s request, U.S. officials said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, “It’s important that when North Korea comes back to the six-party talks that they come back prepared to talk in a serious way.”

Times staff writer Maggie Farley in New York contributed to this report.