State Department
23 May 2008
The chief U.S. envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program, Christopher Hill, visits Beijing and Moscow next week to consult on efforts to move the stalled disarmament process forward. Officials say the assistant secretary of State may meet his North Korean counterpart in the Chinese capital. VOA's David Gollust reports from the State Department.
State Department deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, said Hill, at this point, has only meetings with his Chinese and Russian counterparts scheduled in Beijing and Moscow.
But Hill has also met frequently in the Chinese capital with North Korean envoy Kim Kye-Gwan and Casey made clear he is ready to do so again:
"In terms of whether he's meeting with Kim Kye-Gwan or not, the usual rules apply," said Casey. "Nothing is scheduled. But the North Koreans know he's traveling. And if they see an interest or have a desire to do so, I'm sure they'll arrange something."
A senior official here told VOA U.S. experts are continuing to examine the more than 18,000 papers submitted by North Korea, and that so far there is nothing to suggest that they are not authentic.
The papers, some of them handwritten logs, document plutonium production at the Yongbyon reactor for a five-year period ending in 2007, when the facility was shut down in the first phase of the nuclear deal.
The official said the logs will be critical in determining the validity of the pending declaration, including North Korea's accounting of how much fissionable material was produced at Yongbyon.
In addition to declaring its plutonium stockpile, and the number of weapons produced, North Korea is also to account for the uranium enrichment project U.S. officials believe it conducted, and any proliferation activity it engaged in.
U.S. officials believe North Korea was helping the Damascus government build a nuclear facility in northern Syria that was destroyed in an Israeli air strike in September of last year.