North Korea talks, but now comes the hard part

BEIJING, July 17 (Reuters) After securing the shutdown of a North Korean nuclear reactor, negotiators gathering in Beijing today face the much harder task of coaxing Pyongyang to give up a trove of atomic secrets long guarded as vital for its survival.

Envoys from six countries are scheduled to hold two days of talks starting tomorrow after UN nuclear inspectors verified the shutdown of the North's Yongbyon reactor.

The reactor produces material that can be turned into weapons-grade plutonium and in February North Korea agreed to close it in return for 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, which began moving there from South Korea last week.

North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia will now begin to explore how to scrap the Yongbyon complex and terminate North Korea's nuclear weapons potential.

Negotiators warned of tough talks ahead. South Korean envoy Chun Yung-woo said North Korea had taken ''a strong first step to denuclearisation.'' ''There's still a bumpy road ahead,'' he said on arriving in Beijing.

North Korean chief negotiator Kim Kye-gwan said envoys would shift their attention to the post-shutdown phase.

''So the talks will focus on the sequence of the obligation and actions to be taken by the concerned parties at the second phase under February. 13 agreement,'' Kim said in Pyongyang before heading to Beijing, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

That next stage promises to be contentious even by the bruising standards of the talks that began in 2003, experts said.

''We've got to the first mountain in a pretty big mountain range.

Yongbyon was the first step in a very tough process,'' said Peter Beck, who analyses North Korea from Seoul for the International Crisis Group, a non-government think tank.

UNFROZEN FUNDS Pyongyang refused to close Yongbyon until Washington cleared away an international snarl-up over some million of its funds unfrozen from a Macau bank as part of the February deal.

North Korea officials had called the bank demand a test of US ''sincerity'' and such testing of wills is likely to shape the forthcoming phase of talks.

''I think you have to look at each stage as more difficult than the previous stage. It is a little like one of those video games -- every level becomes more difficult than the previous level,'' US negotiator Christopher Hill said in Seoul yesterday.

He urged the North to permanently disable Yongbyon and give a full account of its nuclear programmes, which Washington has said included efforts to enrich uranium -- another route to making the explosive core of nuclear weapons.

After arriving in Beijing, Hill said he would meet North Korea's Kim and other negotiators before formal talks.

The US State Department said yesterday that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have verified the shutdown of the Yongbyon reactor and expected to verify the status of four other nuclear facilities, including a spent fuel reprocessing plant that can be used to extract plutonium, by tomorrow.

The impoverished North will get 950,000 more tonnes of oil, security assurances and improved access to international trade if it completely scraps its nuclear arms programmes.

But verifying a full deal would entail sweeping inspections of the isolated regime that has long warded off international intrusion.

North Korea is likely to resist such scrutiny and could easily back away from a deal, said Zhang Liangui, a Chinese expert on the North.

After throwing out International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in late 2002, North Korea quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the IAEA enforces.

In 2005, Pyongyang declared it had nuclear arms, and last October it alarmed the world with its first test detonation.

''It's still an unanswered question whether North Korea has the will to abandon nuclear weapons. We can't assume further concessions are a matter of course,'' said Zhang, a researcher at the Central Party School, a top think tank in Beijing.

REUTERS PD PM1240