Diplomats talk N. Korea strategy
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Kelly and South Korean counterpart Lee Soo-hyuck discussed North Korea's nuclear weapons program on November 20.
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SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) -- Top-level diplomats meet in Washington this week to fine-tune a strategy for holding talks with North Korea.
Their goal -- to persuade the communist country to scrap its nuclear weapons programmes.
A South Korean foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly is expected to meet Mitoji Yabunaka, director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau on Thursday.
Also attending would be South Korea's deputy foreign minister, Lee Soo-hyuck.
The three countries, along with China and Russia, trying to organise a second round of talks with impoverished North Korea, possibly this month, aimed at ending the North's nuclear ambitions. The North says it wants security guarantees from Washington.
A first round of six-way talks in Beijing in August ended inconclusively.
Thursday's meeting will be the second involving senior diplomats from the United States and its two key Asian allies since the Beijing summit.
"The date for multilateral talks is not fixed yet as we need an agreement from the North, but the three diplomats are likely to fine-tune other details at a meeting this week," the spokesman said.
Washington wants the North to agree to a verifiable and irreversible end to its nuclear programmes, including production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear fuel.
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Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
