Five regional powers will press North Korea into allowing them to check the account it has given of its plutonium production when sputtering disarmament talks open in Beijing tomorrow for the first time in nine months.
The talks have made historic progress, with the North taking the first steps to dismantle facilities that make bomb-grade fissile material.
But the meetings have yet to produce answers on the secretive state's nuclear weaponry, uranium enrichment plans and whether it proliferated technology to the likes of Syria.
The talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States are scheduled to run for three days and several of those countries' nuclear envoys have already arrived in Beijing for meetings ahead of the formal discussions.
Christopher Hill, the chief US envoy, told reporters yesterday this round of talks would focus on verifying North Korea's declaration on its nuclear activities.
"Our hope is to produce a verification regime that will lay out the rules for the road," he told reporters in Beijing.
In late June, the North presented a long-delayed account of its nuclear weapons programme that contained information on its plutonium production, but did little to address US suspicions of a secret uranium enrichment programme.
Washington responded by starting to take the state off of its terrorism blacklist, which will remove sanctions that have made it almost impossible for Pyongyang to access international finance.
"It's too early to be optimist or pessimistic," South Korean envoy Kim Sook said ahead of the talks. "What's needed is for all sides to be realistic as they coordinate and assess each other's positions."
Lingering questions
US officials also said they were concerned that lingering questions remained about the North's murky nuclear programme.
South Korea said in a statement that President Lee Myung-bak and US President George W. Bush stressed in a bilateral meeting on Wednesday in Sapporo, Japan that they expected a full dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programme, including its nuclear weapons.
"The two Presidents emphasised that phase three negotiations should be resolutely carried out for the purpose of dismantling all Pyongyang's nuclear programmes without fail, including its nuclear arsenal," it said.
Impoverished North Korea has been promised massive aid and an end to its international isolation if it scraps its nuclear weapons programme, considered to pose one of the gravest threats to regional security.
"While the five other nations would want to proceed to the final step of North Korea abandoning its nuclear programme, the North is expected to demand more aid from the world in return for answering more question about its nuclear declaration," said Park Young-ho at the South's Korea Institute for National Unification.
The US decision to take the North off of the terrorism blacklist has not sat well with Washington's ally Japan, which wants to hold Pyongyang accountable for kidnapping several of its nationals decades ago and keeping them in the communist state.
"Japan is feeling somewhat betrayed by the United States," said Kim Sung-han, an international relations professor at Korea University.
Analysts said North Korea, which has a habit of dragging out international talks, may make few moves until a new US president takes office in January 2009.
But they expect progress on a verification mechanism being decided at this round as host China, the North's biggest benefactor, does not want the talks to turn into an embarrassment coming just ahead of it hosting the Olympic Games next month.