Beijing — Nuclear talks with North Korea are moving too slowly, but delegates have no plans to recess and have agreed to continue meeting over the weekend, the chief U.S. envoy said Friday.
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said the 11th day of talks on Friday was "rather excruciating" and produced little.
"We got some things done, but it's not as much as I'd like, and it's not going to get us there in the time span that we think we ought to get there," Hill told reporters.
Diplomats say the talks are deadlocked over the North's insistence on retaining a peaceful nuclear program and the question of what it would receive in exchange for disarming.
The talks coincided with a proposal Friday by European negotiators to Iran that would provide support for a civilian nuclear power program if Tehran renounces atomic weapons. But Hill said the North Koreans didn't mention the initiative during a one-on-one meeting Friday, and he played down comparisons between efforts to keep the two countries from developing atomic arms.
"It's an example of, you know, why we really need to deal with these problems. But I don't want to suggest there's a lot of, you know, cross-pollination there," he said.
When asked whether the negotiators might take a break from the talks, Hill said that was a possible option that would let them review their work. But he said they haven't considered doing so yet.
"If we want to go that route, we want to make sure we've really locked in the progress, so that when people go back to their capitals we don't start from the beginning again," he said.
So far, the talks have produced no breakthroughs in efforts to produce a statement of principles for negotiations aimed at persuading the North to disarm.
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