U.S. urges North Korea to suspend nuclear enrichment

BEIJING, Feb 7 (Reuters) - The United States urged North Korea to suspend nuclear processing as envoys to six-party talks aimed at curbing North Korea's atomic ambitions began converging on Beijing on Wednesday.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill was due to arrive in Beijing after warm-up talks in Tokyo and Seoul and White House spokesman Tony Snow said the United States was looking for North Korea to freeze production of fissile material used in atomic blasts.

"The North Koreans have to suspend nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities, and furthermore, they have to back off the nuclear programme," Snow told a news briefing in Washington on Tuesday.

But even if there is agreement in Beijing, Hill cautioned that many pieces of a statement offering Pyongyang economic and security concessions in return for nuclear disarmament would be unfinished.

"Whether we can make some progress, and I was emphasising the fact that if we make some progress, we're not going to be able to resolve the nuclear issue and achieve the complete implementation of the September 2005 statement in one step," Hill told reporters in Tokyo on Tuesday. "We are going to need several steps."

The six-party talks have brought together host China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia in stop-start negotiations since 2003. In September 2005, North Korea agreed to roll back its nuclear programmes in exchange for diplomatic and economic rewards.

Efforts to convince North Korea to renounce nuclear arms have assumed new urgency since Pyongyang defied international warnings and held its first nuclear test in October, triggering U.N. sanctions.

The focus of the latest round is likely to be on persuading North Korea to first shut down its Yongbyon nuclear plant, the source of fissile material for its nuclear weapons programme.

But North Korea has its own demands and they may again bog down negotiations as they did in December.

North Korea has said it will not scrap its nuclear weapons until Washington lifts a banking crackdown prompted by accusations that Pyongyang ran money counterfeiting and other illicit business.

The latest talks in Beijing between U.S. Treasury Department and North Korean officials seeking to resolve the dispute ended in January with no sign of a breakthrough.

Ralph Cossa, head of the Pacific Forum CSIS think tank in Hawaii, said that while North Korea has said it is committed to the goal of nuclear disarmament, the new talks will produce at most a small step forward.

"While it is reasonable to expect some general reaffirmation of this goal at the upcoming round of talks, substantial progress toward achieving it seems a long way off," he wrote in an emailed commentary.