China to press N.Korea on nuclear dispute: U.S. envoy

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will "reach out" to get North Korea to accept rules to vet its nuclear disclosures, a U.S. envoy said after talks on Saturday seeking to revive momentum in the North's faltering atomic disarmament steps.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said he expects China will work on its communist neighbor, which stopped disabling its Yongbyon nuclear complex because it was unhappy with nuclear verification rules demanded by other countries in six party disarmament talks.

"I was reassured that China's doing all it can, working very hard to address these problems and to get North Korea on track in terms of providing a verification protocol," Hill said after meeting China's top diplomat in the talks, Wu Dawei.

"China's won a lot of gold medals in the past weeks, and I hope that they're going to win one more in terms of resolving this issue," Hill added, referring to the Beijing Olympics.

He made the comments after the talks in Beijing, aimed at shoring up steps to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program in return for aid and diplomatic concessions.

Envoys from Japan and South Korea also gathered for the latest talks. But top North Korea envoy Kim Kye-gwan did not.

North Korea started to disable its Yongbyon nuclear facility in November, but halted that last month, angered that Washington has yet to drop it from the U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism.

Hill said Pyongyang had to agree first on rules allowing inspectors to verify a declaration on its nuclear inventory submitted in June.

"The declaration without a protocol is really like just having one chopstick," he said. "You need two chopsticks if you're going to pick up anything."

STOP-START

The terror list is one of a series of sanctions isolating Pyongyang economically and diplomatically. North Korea has publicly exaggerated the intrusiveness of the verification proposed by other countries in the talks, Hill said.

The U.S. envoy repeatedly stressed the role of China, the country with the closest ties to the North's wary leaders and a vital source of food and energy aid to the struggling state.

Since 2003, China has sponsored the stop-start disarmament negotiations with North Korea, which also include the United States, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

In June, China's heir-apparent Xi Jinping visited Pyongyang and urged North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il to resume the stalled talks on nuclear disarmament.

Hill said he did not know how China would lobby Pyongyang.

"I think the Chinese are going to be working very hard on this," he said. "I think they're going to try to be reaching out to the North Koreans."

Some news reports have suggested North Korea is stepping up preparations to possibly revive Yongbyon.

But U.S. officials have called North Korea's moves to halt disablement a negotiating ploy rather than a real effort to restart the aged complex, which experts believe has made enough plutonium for up to eight bombs.

Hill said Yongbyon was far from ready for restarting.

"Actually reconstituting Yongbyon is not an easy piece of work," he said. "It would really take more than a year."

(Additional reporting by Kim Yeon-hee in SEOUL; Editing by Catherine Evans)