U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy for North Korea issues said Wednesday that any future nuclear-disarmament talks must address a nuclear program the North only recently has revealed. Ambassador Steven Bosworth, just returned from the Obama administration's first high-level talks with North Korea, told reporters at the State Department that Pyongyang's uranium-enrichment program, which gives the country a second way to make nuclear bombs, will “clearly be on the agenda” when the stalled disarmament negotiations resume. “They put it there” by publicly announcing they had finished the first experimental phase of such a program, Bosworth said of the North Koreans. The six-country disarmament talks have focused on North Korean plutonium production, but uranium has always existed as a point of contention. Bosworth, who delivered to Pyongyang a letter from Obama to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, said he urged Pyongyang not to conduct a third nuclear test, and he noted that U.N. Security Council sanctions against North Korea would not be lifted until Pyongyang returned to nuclear talks and made significant progress dismantling its nuclear weapons. Both Pyongyang and Washington agreed during Bosworth's trip on the need to resume the stalled negotiations, but North Korea did not make a firm commitment on when it would rejoin the talks. Bosworth said Wednesday he did not know when such negotiations might begin. --SPA
