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BEIJING - US President Bush has sent North Korea's reclusive leader Kim Jong-il a personal letter, Pyongyang revealed on Thursday, as it faces uncertainty over when and how it will meet nuclear disarmament steps agreed with Washington.
Pyongyang's KCNA news agency said visiting US Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill handed the letter to North Korea's Foreign Minister on Wednesday.
The short report did not disclose any contents of the unusual personal communication from President George W Bush to a communist dictator he has professed to loathe.
In Beijing to brief Chinese officials on his three-day trip to North Korea, Hill had made no mention of the letter in earlier news briefings and was not available for immediate comment.
Bush's gesture comes as North Korea edges towards a deadline to "disable" its key nuclear complex at Yongbyon and disclose all its nuclear activities by the end of December in a deal reached at six-party disarmament talks.
Hajime Izumi, Korea expert at the University of Shizuoka near Tokyo, told Reuters he believed Bush's letter stressed the US position that it would forge diplomatic relations with North Korea if Pyongyang completely dismantled its nuclear programmes.
"Anything else is unthinkable," he said.
Hill said the North was moving to cripple the reactor and other units at Yongbyon so they would be difficult to restart. But disagreement remains over what should appear in the tell-all declaration of nuclear activities Pyongyang has promised.
Before meeting Chinese diplomats to brief them on his Pyongyang trip, Hill said that one of the points of dispute was North Korea's efforts to enrich uranium, a way of making nuclear material that does not rely on reactors.
"We've had a lot of discussions with them about uranium enrichment," Hill told reporters, adding that the United States had "very good evidence" that North Korea had bought enrichment technology and had received assistance from Pakistan.
Under the February 13 agreement reached at the talks with the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China, North Korea agreed to "disable" Yongbyon and make the nuclear declaration in exchange for heavy fuel oil or equivalent aid.
That deal would still leave North Korea to take the crucial steps of irreversibly dismantling Yongbyon and handing over any nuclear weapons materials.
But Pyongyang may now miss the year-end deadline for the disarmament steps, South Korea's foreign minister indicated.
"We are aiming for the initial end-of-the-year deadline, but we may need to be a little more flexible," Song Min-soon said in Seoul, according to a spokesman for his ministry.
US claims that Pyongyang pursued enrichment despite a 1994 disarmament pact were one of the developments that led North Korea to pull out of that pact in 2002 and restart Yongbyon, which can make plutonium usable for nuclear weapons.
It tested a plutonium-based bomb in October last year.
The Bush administration, also distracted by Iran's nuclear ambitions, has played down claims about how advanced North Korea was in enrichment. But Hill suggested that even if those efforts were fruitless or dormant, North Korea had to tell all.
"We want to be completely sure they don't have any ongoing programme," he said. "Being clear about what's happened is also a means for us to build a future relationship."
Metallurgist AQ Khan, admired in Pakistan as "father" of its atomic bomb, was arrested in 2004 for black market sales of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
North Korea has denied to Hill obtaining gas centrifuges from Pakistan used to purify the type of uranium usable for reactor fuel or weapons, an expert on the dispute, Selig Harrison of the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, told Reuters.
"The key to resolving the stalemate in the promising negotiations with North Korea lies in Islamabad," he said in an email. (Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Seoul; editing by Nick Macfie and Roger Crabb)
- REUTERS
