The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, said yesterday a meeting with her North Korean counterpart had been "symbolically historic" but had not produced any details on the country's reported offer to give up its missile programme.
Ms Albright - who met the North Korean Foreign Minister, Mr Paek Nam-Sun, for 70 minutes on the sidelines of an Asian security forum - said she left the talks more optimistic about the future stability of the divided Koreas.
"My meeting today with Foreign Minister Paek constitutes a substantively modest but symbolically historic step away from the sterility and hostility of the past and towards a more direct and more promising approach to resolving differences and establishing common ground," she said. But she said the meeting - the first ministerial-level face-to-face talks between the Cold War enemies who are still technically at war - was not by itself an indication of a full and speedy rapprochement.
"I remain realistic in expectations and firmly committed to co-ordination with our allies," she said, referring to US consultations with Japan, South Korea and others in the region over common policy towards the Stalinist north.
None the less, she said the cordial meeting with Mr Paek, which began with a handshake, had given her reason to be "somewhat more hopeful than before about the prospects for long-term stability on the Korean peninsula and throughout the region". No major announcements had been expected after the meeting on the sidelines of the annual ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), but Mr Albright said she had hoped to be able to clarify a reported North Korean offer to give up its missile program in return for access to space-rocket technology. "We discussed it, but I was not able to glean" any details, she said.
The offer, conveyed by President Putin of Russia during a recent visit to North Korea, has attracted Washington's interest, particularly as the North's longrange missile programme is the main justification for its controversial plan to develop a national missile defence system.
A senior US State Department official who sat in on the Paek-Albright meeting said Ms Albright had tried in vain to raise the matter but could not elicit a response from Mr Paek, who the official described as a "professional diplomat".
Mr Paek "acknowledged that there was a discussion between President Putin and [the North Korean leader] Mr Kim Jong-Il on the subject that the secretary raised, but he was not prepared to offer further clarification," the official said. "We will continue to seek further clarification."
Earlier yesterday, Ms Albright and the South Korean Foreign Minister, Mr Lee Joung-binn, agreed the offer was "worth pursuing" and could produce positive results, but only if it was fully explained.
Despite her inability to coax details from Mr Paek on the missile proposal, Ms Albright said she had expressed to him Washington's pleasure at Pyongyang's moratorium on new long-range missile tests and its recent steps towards easing its decades-old isolation.
Earlier this week, North Korea was admitted into the ARF and reached an agreement with Ottawa under which Canada will become only the second member of the Group of Seven industrialised nations, after Italy, to recognise Pyongyang.
At the same time, however, Ms Albright took pains to note she had also raised US concerns over the north's nuclear programme and explained once more the requirements for Pyongyang achieving its desire to be removed from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.