The United States is consulting with China and other nations to persuade North Korea to reverse its effort to restart work at its nuclear reactor facility, the US State Department said Monday.
North Korea resumed activities in August at the Yongbyon site and on Monday moved to have international seals and monitoring camera's removed so it could re-establish the facility that was to be disabled under a disarmament agreement with Washington and four other countries, reported dpa.
"We, obviously, are concerned about what the North is doing on the ground at Yongbyon, and we're going to work with ... our allies to try to make sure that whatever steps they're taking, that we can see them reversed," State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said.
North Korea agreed in 2007 to dismantle Yongbyon as part of the six-nation agreement but suspended that effort after complaining in August the United States had not lived up to its end of the agreement by removing the Stalinist state from a terrorism blacklist.
President George W Bush began the process of removing Pyongyang from the list but his administration maintains there must first be an agreement established within the six-nation talks for verifying North Korean compliance and that it had fully disclosed the nature of its nuclear work.
"What we're trying to do is, in our diplomatic discussions, try to get the North Koreans back on that path that was outlined in the six- party framework," Wood said.
The six nation talks include China, Japan, Russia, the United States and two Koreas. Bush on Sunday spoke by telephone with Chinese President Hu Jintao, whose country has played the lead mediating role in the negotiations.
North Korea on Monday formally requested that the UN nuclear monitoring watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, removed the seals and cameras. Pyongyang agreed to dismantle its nuclear programme in return for energy aid and broader diplomatic and economic relations.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed the North Korea request at the plant, which includes a reactor for making plutonium, a plant for producing nuclear fuel for the reactor, and the reprocessing facility to process the plutonium.
A Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the removal of the seals had already begun.