BEIJING, July 9 (Reuters): 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 Thursday 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 U.S. envoy, told reporters on Tuesday 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 program that contained information on its plutonium production, but did little to address U.S. suspicions of a secret uranium enrichment program.
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."
US officials also said they were concerned that lingering questions remained about the North's murky nuclear program.
"While the five other nations would want to proceed to the final step of North Korea abandoning its nuclear program, 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.
Impoverished North Korea has been promised massive aid and an end to its international isolation if it scraps its nuclear weapons program, considered to pose one of the gravest threats to regional security.
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.
