US wants written North Korea nuclear commitments

Six-nation disarmament talks in Beijing ended in a stalemate last week over the North's refusal to put into writing any commitments on inspecting its past nuclear activities. The failure of the talks blocked progress on an aid-for-disarmament agreement reached last year and all but extinguished hopes of a successful legacy on the issue by the Bush administration.

Rice told reporters at U.N. headquarters that five of the six parties--the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia--"are completely agreed" on how North Korea's past nuclear activities should be verified.

"What happened in Beijing was that the North Koreans at this last session wouldn't write them down," she said. "But there is, in fact, a verification protocol and a set of assurances that the five are agreed to and that the North Koreans, at least privately before we lifted the terrorist designation, had also agreed to," Rice said.

In late June, Bush relaxed trade sanctions against North Korea and moved to take it off the U.S. terrorism blacklist in exchange for leader Kim Jong Il's decision to hand over a long-awaited accounting of its nuclear bomb-making abilities. The U.S. actions were seen as crucial to making progress in negotiations meant to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons.

But Pyongyang balked at putting its commitments on inspections in writing.

Rice called North Korea's shutdown and subsequent disabling of its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon "an important step forward" in dealing with its plutonium program.

"But we have a lot of questions about the highly enriched uranium route for North Korea. We have a lot of questions about proliferation, and we believe that the mechanism of the six parties and an associated verification protocol will be the best way to resolve those questions and to get to the bottom of the entire nature of the North Korean program," she said.

Rice said in response to a question that the Bush administration will leave incoming President Barack Obama "a pretty good framework, but we'll continue to see if we can get the North Koreans to write down the assurances that they gave us."

"We're going to continue to work on it until the very last day," she said.