Nuclear envoys of two Koreas to meet in Beijing on Wednesday

SEOUL, Sept. 18 (Yonhap) -- The chief nuclear negotiators of South and North Korea will meet in Beijing later this week to hold inter-Korean talks on the North's nuclear weapons programs, a senior government official said Sunday. Wi Sung-lac of South Korea and Ri Yong-ho of North Korea will hold the talks in the Chinese capital on Wednesday, the second round of bilateral diplomatic meetings this year. "The South and North agreed to set a date for the nuclear talks on Sept. 21," said the official. "The exact time and frequency will be discussed there (in Beijing)." The two top nuclear negotiators met in Indonesia for the first time in more than two years in late July, setting the tone for renewed diplomatic efforts to reopen the stalled six-party talks, which also involve the U.S., China, Japan and Russia. "In the upcoming meeting, they will discuss broader issues like they did in Indonesia to create conditions for resuming the six-way talks," said the official. "Securing the preemptive steps for denuclearization is the goal of this meeting." North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, during a rare summit on Aug. 24 with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, reportedly pledged to consider issuing a moratorium on nuclear testing and missile launches if the six-party talks resume. South Korea and the U.S., however, have demand that Pyongyang suspend its uranium enrichment programs, accept inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and announce a moratorium on testing weapons of mass destruction before the multilateral negotiations begin. "But we can't achieve results through just one or two rounds of denuclearization talks," said the official. "The North did not express its position on the preconditions during the recent talks to fix the date." The North's uranium program is among the key hurdles to the resumption of the six-party dialogue, which has been stalled since late 2008. In November last year, North Korea revealed the existence of a uranium enrichment facility, adding urgency to check Pyongyang's nuclear weapons development. The North claims the uranium enrichment program is for peaceful energy development, but outside experts believe that it will give the country a new source of fission material to make atomic bombs, in addition to its widely known plutonium-based nuclear weapons program.