US welcomes N Korea nuclear offer

The US delegation may visit the Yongbyon nuclear complex

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has welcomed North Korea's offer to suspend testing and producing nuclear weapons and freeze its nuclear industry.

Mr Powell said the statement, released on Tuesday by the official KCNA news agency, was "interesting and positive".

"[The statement] implied that they would give up all aspects of nuclear programme, not just weapons," Mr Powell told journalists at a news conference.

Six-country talks aimed at defusing the crisis may not resume until next month.

Mr Powell said that all six parties were keen "to get back to the table" and that the US was looking at what the outcome of the talks should be.

"We have held a lot of material for a long time that shows that proliferation is a problem," he said.

"I hope that colleagues in Pyongyang are watching this and realising that they are wasting a lot of money for programmes... that will not gain them anything."

'Starting point'

The moves by the US and North Korea come as two groups of US experts travelled to the North, where they may visit the Yongbyon complex at the centre of the crisis over the North's nuclear aims.

YONGBYON Site of several nuclear facilities, 100km north of Pyongyang Includes 5MWt experimental nuclear reactor and fuel rod storage facility North Korea says it has reprocessed plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods at site

It is thought the Americans will remain in North Korea until Saturday.

If they are allowed to visit Yongbyon, they would become the first outsiders to see the plant since United Nations inspectors were forced to leave North Korea a year ago.

Pyongyang has in the past offered to freeze its nuclear programme in return for a non-aggression pact with the US and other diplomatic and economic concessions.

But the US has said that it wants North Korea to begin dismantling its nuclear programme before it makes any concessions.

Nuclear stand-off

Talks had been due to resume this month but seasonal holidays and the differences between Washington and Pyongyang mean February is now more likely.

As well as the US and North Korea, the discussions involve South Korea, China, Russia and Japan.

The last round of negotiations, held in Beijing in August, ended without progress.

North Korea and the US have been locked in a stand-off over the nuclear issue for over a year after the North claimed last year to have finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods being stored at Yongbyon.

This would be enough to help it build up to six nuclear weapons.

Pyongyang may already have a handful of weapons, experts say.