Rice to press North Korean envoy on nukes

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hopes to judge North Korea's seriousness about abandoning nuclear weapons when she holds the Bush administration's highest-level talks in four years with the Stalinist state this week.

The North has been given a four-page draft document laying out what the United States wants from it to prove it has told the truth about its past atomic programs. Rice expects Pyongyang's foreign minister to provide at least an initial response to the proposal at Wednesday's meeting.

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

The draft calls for intrusive inspections of North Korean nuclear facilities, soil sampling and interviews with key scientists. It was presented to the North Koreans earlier this month by Hill and representatives of the other four nations pushing the denuclearization effort.

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 told reporters accompanying Rice to an Asian security forum in Singapore where she will see North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun and their counterparts from China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

After talks with Hill on Tuesday, South Korea's main nuclear envoy Kim Sook said: "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.

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.

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

Rice herself said she would 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."

Although Rice 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.

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Associated Press Writer Jae-Soon Chang contributed to this report.