WASHINGTON, Dec 6: US President George Bush has made an unprecedented personal appeal to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il to disclose and disable his nuclear programmes by Dec 31, US officials said Thursday.

Nearly six years after branding Pyongyang part of an “axis of evil” with Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Bush wrote Kim on Dec 1 to urge him to fully declare and disable his atomic infrastructure by year’s end, aides said.

The correspondence, which the White House described as Bush’s first ever direct communication with Kim, came amid a growing belief among Washington and its diplomatic partners that the effort will slip into next year.

The US president also sent letters to the leaders of China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, fellow participants in the six-country negotiations aimed at ending the nuclear standoff with North Korea, said spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

“In these letters, the president reiterated our commitment to the six-party talks and stressed the need for North Korea to come forward with a full and complete declaration of their nuclear programmes, as called for in the September 2005 six-party agreement” said Johndroe.

The US special envoy for North Korea, Christopher Hill, told reporters in Beijing that “we felt we were at a crucial moment and it was important to reach out to all the parties and that’s what the president did.” The letter came as Bush, facing his final year in office, took fire for his handling of the standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme after a new US intelligence report that Tehran halted its atomic weapons efforts in 2003.

Hill praised Pyongyang’s “excellent” cooperation on the disabling of its atomic activities, saying that the process was “really moving ahead” and insisting that “anyone who has seen it can see that it is on schedule.” But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters aboard her plane bound for Brussles that the Stalinist regime may miss the deadline, blaming technical reasons and not a lack of cooperation.

“It’s going to take a monumental effort to get all of this done by the end of the year and I’m not concerned about whether it’s Dec 31 or not,” said Rice, who was on her way to Nato talks.

“Things seem to be on track because the disablement is just something technical in nature. It’s not something you can rush along,” she said after a late Wednesday telephone discussion with Hill.

The North, which shocked the world with its first nuclear test in October 2006, agreed this year in the six-party talks to disable its plutonium-producing plants and declare all nuclear programs and facilities by year-end in return for major energy aid.Hill delivered Bush’s letter to North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui-Chun this week, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Thursday in a three-line dispatch which gave no further details.

“The president sent the letter saying ‘we’re nearing the end.’ He sent a letter to all the members of the parties so we can keep it all on track,” said spokeswoman Dana Perino.

Asked whether the missive was drive by confidence that North Korea would meet the deadline or concern that it would not, Perino demurred: “I would not characterize it as either, I would characterize it as timely.” Hill, the US chief negotiator with Pyongyang, visited the North this week to observe the US-led disabling of its nuclear plants at Yongbyon.

But South Korea’s Foreign Minister Song Min-Soon cautioned it may miss the deadline for the declaration and warned that the process “is at a crossroads where it may proceed towards a stable phase or to a rough road.” The North is also demanding that it be removed from a US list of state sponsors of terrorism in return for denuclearisation, as envisaged in the six-nation pact.—AFP