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SEOUL, Jan 6: A US delegation flew to North Korea on Tuesday, hoping to visit a nuclear complex at the heart of the North's atomic arms programme, as Pyongyang pitched what it called a "bold concession" to restart talks.
A trip to the Yongbyon nuclear complex by the unofficial US delegation would mark the first time outsiders had been allowed into the plant since UN inspectors were expelled a year ago at the start of the latest North Korean nuclear crisis.
The five-day tour by US scholars and Congressional aides comes as the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea try to coax North Korea to resume nuclear negotiations to follow up an inconclusive round of talks in Beijing last August.
A US newspaper and South Korean officials have said the group would visit Yongbyon, but North Korea has yet to confirm that and the head of the delegation said he was not certain.
"It's like going to Disneyland and knowing what rides you're going to go on. We're not going to be able to tell you. We'll know what we've seen when we get back," said John Wilson Lewis, a professor emeritus at Stanford University.
Charles "Jack" Pritchard, a former State Department envoy for North Korea who now works at the Brookings Institution think-tank, and Sig Hecker, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1985 to 1997, are accompanying Lewis as private citizens. Also on the trip are two US Senate Foreign Relations Committee aides - Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi.
"BOLD CONCESSION": Washington says the visitors are not going on behalf of the Bush administration, which remains focused on dealing with the nuclear dispute at six-way talks.
The six parties have agreed to meet in principle, but the talks have been delayed by haggling over the agenda, and are unlikely to take place before next month.
In particular, the United States and North Korea differ over the sequence of steps to eliminate the North's nuclear programme and the two nuclear bombs Washington believes Pyongyang has.
With prospects for talks in January appearing to recede, North Korea called on the United States to accept an offer to freeze its nuclear arms programme, saying Pyongyang would throw in the "bold concession" of suspending nuclear power generation.
But a commentary by Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency on Tuesday said US policy - which demands the irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programme rather than a freeze - "will destroy the foundation of the dialogue and cast a dark shadow" over hopes to resume six-party nuclear talks.
KCNA said the overall North Korean proposal, first issued in December, represented "bold magnanimous measures" to resume multilateral talks and not preconditions for negotiations as Washington has described them.
KCNA's comments on Tuesday reiterated a proposal North Korea first issued on December 9, calling it "the starting point and the core issue in continuing the six-way talks".
"The DPRK is 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," said KCNA, using the abbreviation of North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
North Korea has not hitherto offered to suspend its nuclear power programme, which has already been halted once because of international concerns about potential misuse. North Korea has no fully operational nuclear power station, but does have a small reactor at the Yongbyon complex.
In exchange for the overall freeze, North Korea wants "the U.S. to delist the DPRK as a sponsor of terrorism, lift political, economic and military sanctions and blockade on it and for the US and neighbouring countries of the DPRK to supply heavy oil, power and other energy resources", KCNA said.
Heavy oil shipments to North Korea were suspended in November 2002, a month after US officials said Pyongyang had said it was operating a clandestine uranium enrichment programme.-Reuters
