U.S. & N. Korea Negotiate Nukes

North Korea held a rare private meeting with the United States on Wednesday and also won an offer of compensation from South Korea if it relinquishes its nuclear weapons program — part of a spate of activity on the first day of long-anticipated six-country talks.

The highly unusual meeting came on the sidelines of six-nation talks aimed at ending the standoff over the North's nuclear program.

The talks resumed Thursday with the United States continuing its push for a verifiable end to the North's ambitions of becoming a nuclear power.

Delegates began the second day of negotiations emphasizing that any conclusions were premature. "It's just getting started," Japan's delegate, Foreign Ministry Director General Mitoji Yabunaka, said before the talks reconvened Thursday.

In Seoul, a South Korean official made a statement — widely and urgently reported by his country's media — that the United States and North Korea met privately for the second straight day early Thursday on the sidelines of the talks.

But Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun's remark was almost immediately disputed by his own ministry, where a spokesman could not confirm the new talks. And the South Korean delegation spokesman in Beijing, Shin Bong-kio, said that "we don't think that it's true."

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said it had no immediate information on any meeting Thursday morning.

Neither side gave details of the meeting Wednesday afternoon between U.S. Secretary of State James Kelly and North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, but the U.S. State Department described it as "useful."

North Korea and the United States have been at odds over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions for years and especially since October 2002, when Kelly said the North told him it had a secret weapons program based on enriched uranium.

North Korea publicly denies it has a uranium program in addition to its known plutonium-based program, but it brandishes the threat of what it vaguely describes as its "nuclear deterrent" in an effort to extract concessions.

The impoverished North wants aid in return for halting its nuclear programs, and in December demanded economic aid and other U.S. concessions in return for a freeze. Washington said at the time that Pyongyang must not only freeze, but start dismantling, its nuclear programs first.

North Korea also wants a nonaggression treaty with the United States or at least a security guarantee from all five of its negotiating partners.

During the opening of talks Wednesday, Kelly said Pyongyang has nothing to worry about. The United States wants an end to all of the North's nuclear weapons development but has "no intention of invading or attacking" the country, he said.

"The United States seeks complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all North Korea's nuclear programs, both plutonium and uranium," Kelly said.

North Korea reiterated demands for compensation ahead of the talks, and South Korea proposed "countermeasures" if the North froze its nuclear program and showed signs of scrapping it.

"If it is such a freeze, we can push for countermeasures," Seoul's head delegate, Lee Soo-hyuck, told reporters. He didn't elaborate, and it was unclear whether the United States had directly endorsed the proposal.

This week's meeting is the second round of six-party talks. The first one in August, scheduled for three days only, yielded little more than a vague promise to meet again. Parties have made this meeting open-ended, hoping for more progress.

"I think it's realistic optimism," said Bill Tow, a professor of international relations at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. "They wouldn't have come together at this juncture unless they felt there was a reasonable chance there might be some progress made."

All of North Korea's partners in the talks say they want a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula.