Washington ? The Bush administration Friday warned that private visits to North Korea’s nuclear complex shouldn’t interfere with efforts to reconvene international talks on dismantling the secretive communist country’s nuclear weapons program.

North Korea has invited one or two groups of U.S. nuclear experts to visit its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon next week, the first outside visit since the North Koreans expelled United Nations monitors 14 months ago and provoked a diplomatic standoff that has occasionally threatened to escalate into a military confrontation.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the administration neither supported nor opposed the private visit but added: “It should be clearly understood that the groups or individuals are not acting on behalf of the administration.”

Nonetheless, the planned visit to Yongbyon could yield some important information, although it isn’t clear how much access the visitors will have to Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities. U.S. intelligence agencies think the North already has one or two nuclear weapons, but they’ve been unable to verify North Korea’s claims that it has resumed reprocessing uranium and that 8,000 spent uranium fuel rods already have been reprocessed into plutonium — enough to make a half-dozen nuclear weapons.

One administration official, who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because he’s not an authorized spokesman, said North Korea might have agreed to the visit in an attempt to strengthen its hand in the stalled six-nation talks by demonstrating that it has already built one or more nuclear weapons or that it is capable of building them quickly.

In exchange for canceling its nuclear weapons program, isolated, impoverished North Korea has demanded that the United States must first promise not to attack it and agree to provide it with food, fuel, commercial electric power plants and other humanitarian aid. The Bush administration continues to insist that Pyongyang must first dismantle its nuclear program with international verification.