Tenuous deal for North Korea

The promise of such a breakthrough – distant though it may be – is held in the creation of five working groups agreed to on Tuesday. Those groups will tackle issues ranging from denuclearizing the peninsula to normalizing Pyongyang's relations with Washington and Tokyo and setting up a "Northeast Asia Peace and Security Mechanism."

Those provisions make Tuesday's agreement potentially far broader than its failed predecessor, the 1994 Geneva Framework Agreement.

The political context "would provide stronger and more stable grounding for anything in the agreement," says Denny Roy, researcher at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. "But that would be much harder to achieve."

Given the history of failure in dealing with North Korea, Dr. Roy is skeptical of the new agreement.

"Seeing this followed through each of the steps, with both sides agreeing that they have been fulfilled, is a much harder task than simply reaching the agreement," he cautions.

North Korean state media Tuesday reported that the agreement required only the "temporary suspension of the country's nuclear activities," raising doubts about the government's interpretation of the deal.

"It is hard to judge North Korea's behavior this time," says Zhang Liangui, a North Korea expert at the Chinese Communist Party School in Beijing. "It is hard to say if they have made a definitive decision to give up nuclear weapons, or whether this is just another way to deal with the pressure."

One potential sticking point is North Korea's denial that it has a program to enrich uranium separate from the plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon. US officials have insisted that program does exist, since Mr. Hill's predecessor, James Kelly, said Pyongyang admitted it to him in 2002.

North Korean chief delegate Kim Kye Gwan said that his government "was prepared to sit with us and discuss it and reach a mutually satisfactory conclusion," Hill said of the allegations. "We need to know precisely what is involved."

Notably absent from the agreement was any mention of the US blacklisting of a Macao bank that holds North Korean assets. That sanction was the reason that North Korea gave for leaving the last round of six-party talks.

Hill said that he had pledged to the North Koreans that the Macao issue would be "resolved" within 30 days.

One of the working groups, which will meet within 30 days, will also take up Pyongyang's demand to be removed from Washington's list of states sponsoring terrorism.

Another working group is to take up normalization of relations between Japan and North Korea – a forum in which Japan can demand that North Korea account for all Japanese kidnapped to North Korea. Japan, alone among the participants at the talks, balked at providing aid to North Korea, with Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe insisting first on resolution of the kidnapping issue.

Other working groups are to discuss resolving regional conflicts and a peace treaty to replace the truce that ended the Korean War in 1953 – a longstanding North Korean demand that the North has linked to demands for withdrawal of American troops from South Korea.

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