US team hopes to visit Korean nuclear plant

A US DELEGATION flew to North Korea yesterday, 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 US, 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 asprivate citizens.

Also on the trip are two US Senate Foreign Relations Committee aides Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi.

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 US 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.

North Korea is on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism for its role in the mid-air bombing of a South Korean jet in 1987. Oil shipments were suspended in 2002, a month after US officials said it had said it was operating a uranium programme.