Beijing ? International talks seeking to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program were in their “endgame” today, the top U.S. negotiator said, before delegates met to consider a Chinese proposal for resolving the standoff.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said the talks would wrap up in a matter of hours.

“We’re at the endgame,” he said as he left his hotel early today.

Hill declined to reveal specifics of the proposal. Russia’s envoy said earlier that it acknowledged North Korea’s right to a peaceful nuclear program after disarming – but it was not known if that draft had been revised.

Washington had previously rejected allowing North Korea any atomic program, saying its decades of relentlessly pursuing a nuclear bomb means it can’t be trusted.

Hill said North Korea “has some demands and the question is whether anybody accepts those demands.”

South Korea’s main envoy, Song Min-soon, said today that it was “time to make a decision.”

He added that a resolution depended on all six countries at the talks – China, Japan, Russia, the United States and the two Koreas.

“It is not a situation where just one party decides whether to accept,” Song said.

The night before Hill said he was leaving at the end of today, no matter what happened at the meeting for all six delegations to state their positions.

“Everyone knows each other’s positions, everyone knows the agreement, everyone can almost recite it from memory at this point, so I’m not sure we have to do too much talking,” he said Sunday evening. “I think we have to sort of … put the cards on the table and see where we are.”

Hill described the proposal before the talks as “a good effort to try to bridge the remaining differences, which I believe are difficult but certainly not insurmountable.”