The US and North Korea agreed to keep exchanging views on the uranium enrichment issue, which would not be a stumbling block to the new round of six-party talks, a senior US official said at a press briefing Wednesday.  

"One of the issues we talked about with the North was that of highly enriched uranium," the official said, referring to bilateral contact on Tuesday.

Delegates held a plenary session lasting almost three hours Wednesday at which they clarified their stances and offered views on how to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

The issue of highly enriched uranium, which can be used to produce nuclear explosive devices, was also mentioned in a keynote speech by the US at the fourth round of six-party negotiations yesterday, he said.

"We obviously have some differences with them about the sequencing of these issues," he said. "We did not achieve an agreement with them on that but we did agree to keep on talking about it."

Also discussed yesterday was the US proposal set forth in June 2004 that required North Korea to give an up-front pledge to dismantle all its plutonium- and uranium-based weapons programs before receiving any energy or other assistance.

"The real efforts are to keep the focus on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." he said. "We don't think that we will have a problem defining denuclearization."

(Xinhua News Agency July 28, 2005)