Austria ? The U.N. atomic watchdog agency and the U.S. government both reported progress Friday in the effort to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the communist regime is cooperating with U.N. experts overseeing the mothballing of key nuclear facilities, while a senior American diplomat said talks with the communist regime had produced a basic “consensus on the way forward.”

The two assessments suggested that efforts to do away with the North’s nuclear weapons threat remained on track since the process resumed in July, when the reclusive country made good on promises to shut down a plutonium-producing facility.