U.S. envoy to visit Japan, China for N.Korea talks

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill speaks to reporters in Moscow May 30, 2008.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill will visit Japan and China this week for talks with officials from their governments and South Korea on curtailing North Korea's nuclear weapons plans, the State Department said on Tuesday.

But State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos did not suggest any breakthrough was imminent in the long-running six-party diplomatic efforts on North Korea, a process that intensified after Pyongyang carried out a nuclear test in 2006. "We are where we are," Gallegos said.

Hill leaves Washington on Wednesday and will hold talks in Japan with Japanese and South Korean officials on Thursday, Gallegos said. He did not know whether this was a trilateral meeting or whether Hill would see the two groups of officials separately.

On Friday Hill will travel to China to continue the consultations, Gallegos said, adding that no return date has been set.

North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia are involved in the six-party talks. Under a 2005 multilateral agreement, North Korea promised to abandon all its nuclear programs in exchange for diplomatic and economic benefits.

But the agreement has been bogged down by Pyongyang's failure to produce a promised declaration of all its nuclear programs by the end of last year, as a prelude to their being eventually dismantled.

The declaration has been held up partly because of Pyongyang's reluctance to discuss any transfer of nuclear technology to other countries. The United States accuses North Korea of helping Syria with a nuclear reactor project and says the facility was destroyed in an Israeli air strike in September.

Hill met his North Korean counterpart at the end of May in Beijing. He said then that they had made progress but had not pinned down a timetable for completing the current stage of the nuclear negotiations.

He also said that completing everything by the end of the year would be a challenge. A new U.S. president will be elected in November and take office in January.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)