WASHINGTON, Sept 5: The United States shifted its approach towards North Korea on Thursday and signalled it may offer Pyongyang incentives to end its suspected nuclear programme.

Washington, which had previously said it would not give Pyongyang “quid pro quos” to end its nuclear ambitions, hinted at the concession when a senior official said the US was willing to discuss a “sequence” of unspecified steps it could take if North Korea did so.

It was unclear what these steps might be, but US officials have previously talked about offering North Korea some sort of security guarantees and, over the long term, of the possibility of energy and economic assistance.

The senior official offered the first detailed US briefing on last week’s six-nation talks in Beijing aimed at finding a diplomatic path to end North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, which Washington views as a threat to its allies South Korea and Japan and as a destabilizing factor throughout northeast Asia.

The official reiterated the US position that it was willing to discuss the possibility of offering security guarantees to North Korea — something Pyongyang has long demanded — if it gives up nuclear weapons.

“We made clear that we are not seeking to strangle North Korea. We stated that North Korea unquestionably has a much better future if it turns away from nuclear weapons,” the official told reporters, saying the US team had sought to present a positive case to Pyongyang to abandon such weapons.

“We made clear that we can sincerely discuss security concerns in the context of nuclear dismantlement and that we are willing to discuss a sequence of denuclearization measures with corresponding measures on the part of both sides,” he added, declining to say what steps Washington might take.

“We weren’t able to get into the details of any of this but I think we’re going to be ready to explore these in (the) time to come,” he added, saying he

was confident of more talks among the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, Japan and China.

Initial coverage of the talks focused on Pyongyang’s threat to test a nuclear weapon, but the senior US official provided a slightly more upbeat assessment on Thursday, saying North Korea had also said it did not want nuclear weapons.

The North Korean nuclear crisis erupted in October when US officials said Pyongyang admitted to a clandestine programme to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, violating its agreements with the United States and its international commitments.—Reuters