United States and North Korean negotiators completed two days of top level talks on Friday without reporting any progress on attempts to persuade the Asian country to scrap its nuclear weapons program.
The US special envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, and the North’s first vice foreign minister Kim Kye-Gwan called an end to the negotiations shortly after a working lunch at the US mission to the United Nations in New York.
The US State Department has said the talks were “exploratory” to determine whether North Korea was willing to stick to a a 2005 accord and take “concrete and irreversible steps toward denuclearization.”
Neither side made any immediate comment after the negotiations — the first since Bosworth visited Pyongyang in December 2009.
On Thursday, the State Department said the first day of meetings had been “serious and businesslike”. Kim also called the atmosphere “constructive”.
The United States has stressed that North Korea must make moves to scrap its nuclear weapons if six decades of tensions are to be ended. — AFP