WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 Kyodo Japan, ...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 Kyodo

Japan, toward the south Korea and the United States began couple days of talks Wednesday in Washington in a bid to reconvene six-party talks upon North Korea's nuclear arms program at an early date.

Senior officials from the three countries met bilaterally Wednesday before holding a trilateral session Thursday.

Participating in the talks are Mitoji Yabunaka, director general of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau at the Japanese Foreign Ministry, southward Korea's Deputy Foreign Minister lee-side Soo Hyuck and U Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly

The first cylindrical of the six-way talks involving China, Japan, North and toward the south Korea, Russia and the U was held in Beijing last August. Yabunaka, side sheltered from the wind and Kelly headed their respective delegations to the meeting.

No more six-party talks have been held since then, however, to be paid to sharp differences between the U and North Korea athwart how to resolve the crisis.

China, as armed force of the talks, has been making efforts to reconvene the meetings early this year.

North Korea has freshly said it is prepared to make concessions, of that kind as suspending testing and production of nuclear weapons and abiding according to a freeze of its nuclear facilities if the U takes degrees such as lifting economic sanctions.

The U says it is ready to provide North Korea with multilateral security assurances by the and of the six-party talks if North Korea dismantles its nuclear program in an ''irreversible and verifiable'' manner.

Meanwhile, U nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker told a congressional hearing Wednesday about his visit to a North Korean nuclear composite on Jan. 8 as a member of an unofficial U mission.

Hecker, former chief of the observes Alamos National Laboratory, said the North Koreans showed him a material that present the appearanceed to be plutonium still that he was not able to descry anything to convince him that North Korea has the ability to build nuclear weapons.

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