Pyongyang's envoys drop bombshell in talks with US

A request from North Korea to send two officials to see Bill Richardson, a diplomatic trouble-shooter for the Clinton administration, seemed to offer the smallest hope that communications would be renewed between and Washington and Pyongyang over the North's secret nuclear programme.

Mr Richardson was led to believe he would be getting a private message from two diplomats – one of them an old acquaintance from his days as the US ambassador to the United Nations, when he handled a previous showdown with North Korea in 1994. That message, possibly, might provide a way to break the deadlock between Washington's refusal to negotiate and the North's demand for a non-aggression treaty.

Instead, just as a first two-hour session on Thursday evening was ending in the state house at Santa Fe, where Mr Richardson now resides in his new capacity as Governor of New Mexico, there was a public bombshell: an announcement by North Korea that it was pulling out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

If anybody can decode the conflicting signals from Pyongyang, it is Mr Richardson. He has travelled to North Korea and was closely involved in the 1994 framework agreement – now repudiated by the North – whereby the US would provide fuel oil and help construct two reactors for peaceful nuclear power, in return for mothballing its existing plutonium-based weapons programme. He is the US official most trusted by the regime's secretive and paranoid leaders.

But even Mr Richardson is unlikely to know for sure what Kim Jong Il and his military high command are up to; whether they are simply raising the stakes to strike a new deal with the US, including a non-aggression promise and the resumption of fuel supplies, or whether they have decided that this time they will produce a nuclear arsenal, to prevent the sort of pressure the US is now exerting on Iraq.

The first round of discussions, over dinner at the governor's mansion, was described as "candid but cordial" and a second session took place yesterday. But Mr Richardson is said mainly to have listened, in keeping with the Washington's policy to "talk but not negotiate" with the North until it has abandoned its nuclear programme.

"The next step is for North Korea to completely dismantle its nuclear weapons programme in a visible and verifiable manner," a National Security Council spokesman said, adding that Washington wanted more than a mere halt to the North's efforts to produce plutonium and enrich uranium.

The CIA believes that Pyongyang may already have one or two nuclear warheads. If it sees through its threat to reactivate its reactor at Yongbyon, from which it ejected UN weapons inspectors last week, it could produce enough plutonium for six weapons within a few months, American experts believe.

Whatever emerges from the talks, it is unlikely to resolve the US dilemma over North Korea, as it focuses at the same time on forcing President Saddam to disarm. The official line, set out by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, last weekend, is that the confrontation is not a crisis. Washington is determined to secure a peaceful diplomatic solution, the Bush administration says. But that outcome is unlikely unless Washington makes the concessions it has refused to do so far.