North Korea wants light-water reactors

North Korea's nuclear negotiator said yesterday that the North should be provided with light-water reactors in exchange for disabling its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon.

Kim Kye-gwan was speaking to reporters at Beijing airport after the latest round of six-party talks on dismantling its nuclear weapons programme ended the previous day without setting any new deadline.

"To eventually dismantle the nuclear facilities, light-water reactors are needed," China's official Xinhua news agency quoted Kim as saying, adding that North Korea would carry out the obligations it had undertaken in previous rounds.

Kim also said Pyongyang would need to consider how far trust had been built before deciding whether to include details of its nuclear weapons programme in a declaration of its nuclear secrets it is required to provide in the next phase of the deal, Japan's Kyodo news agency said. The United States and North Korea had reached an agreement, now defunct, in 1994 to freeze the Yongbyon facility in exchange for two relatively proliferation-resistant light-water reactors.

It is more difficult to extract weapons-grade nuclear material, such as plutonium, from light-water reactors than from North Korea's ageing graphite reactor. Xinhua cited Kim as saying after arriving back in Pyongyang that the latest round of talks had achieved "good results".

Delegates from the two Koreas, United States, Japan, Russia and China met for three days in Beijing, and they decided that working groups would meet before the end of August to discuss how to press forward with a disarmament deal. Another round of six-way talks is slated for September, which Chinese envoy Wu Dawei said on Friday would "work out the road map" for implementing disarmament steps.

Kim also called on Japan not to step up pressure on it, Xinhua said. While the report did not specifically refer to it, the two countries are locked in a dispute over Japanese police raids targeting a pro-North Korean group in Tokyo.

That dispute dates back to the abductions of Japanese by North Korea, formally named the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), in the 1970s and 1980s.