Chief North Korean negotiator Kim Kye-gwan is to arrive on Thursday morning. The official schedule starts with a meeting of chief delegates in the afternoon, without a plenary session. "There will be a succession of bilateral negotiations,” a South Korean government official said. “Once agreements are produced, we will hold a plenary session."

The South Korean, U.S. and Japanese chief negotiators in the six-party talks (from left): Chun Yung-woo, Christopher Hill and Kenichiro Sasae./Yonap

The big variables are the degree to which the North can be brought to freeze its nuclear activities and the rewards offered by the other five countries -- South Korea, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia. In Berlin talks last month, Hill and Kim apparently reached an agreement on the principle that the North will halt operation of a reactor at Yongbyon in return for energy assistance. But it is too soon to be confident of a final agreement. First of all, the terms are vague. "As long as the talks are premised on ‘dismantlement’, the term surely means more than a simple 'freezing,'" a senior South Korean government official said.

But David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), who met Kim in North Korea right after the Berlin talks, told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday that North Korea would want to freeze its nuclear facilities to the extent that they could be reopened within a month rather than a year. It simply wants to halt operations, then, without taking spent fuel rods out of the reactor and canning them. Dr. Kim Tae-woo, a nuclear expert at the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses, said, "The U.S. wants to take out and seal all fuel rods, and dismantle North Korea's nuclear program. But North Korea will highly likely decide on the level of freezing depending on the level of compensations it can get in return."

Press members line up at Beijing Capital International Airport to cover the arrival of the delegates to the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program on Wednesday./Yonhap

There is fodder for conflict between South Korea, the U.S. and Japan over who shoulders the main burden of assistance to the North and how much cost each party should carry. Washington and Tokyo are less than keen to provide the energy assistance. Since Pyongyang reneged on the 1994 Geneva Accords, the Bush administration and U.S. Congress are reluctant to bear the burden of resuming annual supplies of 500,000 tons of heavy oil worth US$150 million. Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said Tokyo can't offer anything unless North Korea “shows sincerity” over its abductions of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 80s.

Seoul is more proactive as it wants inter-Korean contacts to resume this year, before the current government’s term ends. The South Korean government would therefore likely bear the biggest burden, as it did in 1994. As a result of the Geneva Accords, South Korea bore 70 percent or W3.54 billion (US$1=W933) of the cost of construction of a light-water reactor in North Korea. In actuality, South Korea paid more than W1 trillion until the project was suspended last year.

The six-party talks have been an epic undertaking. Two rounds have been held since the 2005 statement of principles, but no progress was made because North Korea took issue with U.S. financial sanctions. Officially, in any case, the current round is billed as “the third phase of the fifth-round six-party talks."

(englishnews@chosun.com )