The U.S. and South Korea pressured the North to remove or disable more core devices, but North Korea resisted the pressure. According to a source familiar with the talks, the three are in the final stages of negotiations.

The U.S. and North Korean delegations held intensive bilateral talks on Wednesday and Thursday on concrete methods for the disablement and declaration of all programs, and on the timeframe for the U.S. to strike North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism as a reward.

Chief U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said there was progress on ways to disable the nuclear facilities. “We would like to do more, (North Korea) would like to do less,” Hill said. “We will figure out a way through that, this is not a big gap.” South Korea’s top nuclear negotiator Chun Yung-woo also said a gap remains but “won’t be impossible to narrow.”

Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill (far right), his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan (second from right) and Sung Kim, the director of the Korea Desk at the U.S. State Department (far left), talk before the second round of the sixth six-party negotiations at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on Thursday afternoon.

A senior South Korean government official hinted the six countries could meet halfway, as several more months of negotiations on the level of nuclear disablement would delay the abandonment of North Korea’s nuclear program while the North is supposed to start dismantling nuclear facilities starting in the first half of next year.

Earlier, Hill said additional discussions on declaration of materials were needed since “one country” -- apparently North Korea -- proposed reporting the nuclear programs in two stages. That suggests the North wants to report some key elements like the amount of plutonium it has as late as possible to get more rewards.

Meanwhile, with regard to suspicions that it has a secret uranium enrichment, North Korea reportedly admitted to importing about 150 tons of hard aluminum pipes, a material for a centrifugal separator, from Russia in the past. The pipes can be used to make some 2,600 centrifugal separators for the enrichment of uranium, a South Korean government official said.

North Korea disclosed this in Washington-Pyongyang working talks on normalizing bilateral relations in Geneva early this month. But it did not say whether it had actually used the pipes to make centrifuges and enrich uranium. North Korea will reportedly deal with this issue during the process of its declaration of nuclear programs.

A South Korean government official said, "Despite North Korea's admission that it imported aluminum pipes, we can’t yet say it has made (weapons-grade) enriched uranium with the pipes. Many other components are also needed to make centrifugal separators."

Although all six nations are participating in the ongoing talks, the U.S. and North Korea are stealing the show. Hill and chief North Korean negotiator Kim Kye-gwan have reportedly also exchanged views on allegations that North Korean transferred nuclear materials to Syria. Despite raising such potentially divisive issues, both the U.S. and North Korea still look positive for the moment. South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, during a visit to New York on Wednesday to attend the UN General Assembly, told reporters, “Suspicions about North Korea's transaction of nuclear materials with Syria can be discussed during the ongoing six-party talks. But it seems unlikely that the issue will have major impact."

(englishnews@chosun.com )