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WASHINGTON: The United States announced Saturday it learned that North Korea has shut down its Yongbyon nuclear facilities, and said it now hopes for "rapid progress" toward Pyongyang's nuclear disarmament.
"The US has been informed Saturday that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea shut down its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement.
"We welcome this development and look forward to the verification and monitoring of this shutdown by the International Atomic Energy Agency team that has arrived in the DPRK," he said.
A US official said that Washington was informed of the shutdown through North Korea's mission to the United Nations.
The announcement came after UN inspectors, carrying 100 cases of equipment weighing about one ton, arrived in Pyongyang to supervise the reactor shutdown.
Their arrival was the first step in the February 13 deal under which Pyongyang agreed to scrap its nuclear programme in exchange for aid and security guarantees, including 50,000 tons of fuel oil aid from South Korea. The first 6,200-ton shipment arrived early Saturday.
McCormack said Saturday the United States, together with all the partners in the six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear programme-- the two Koreas, Japan, China and Russia -- look forward further progress.
"We, along with all our other Six-Party partners, remain firmly committed to achieving the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula through the implementation of the September 2005 Joint Statement," McCormack said in reference to a prior declaration before talks broke off two years ago.
"With the Six-Party Talks negotiators set to meet July 18 in Beijing, we look forward to working with all parties to make rapid progress in implementing the next phase," he said.
According to the February deal, "the DPRK has committed to declaring all its nuclear programmes and disabling all its existing nuclear facilities," he said.
The UN inspection, the first since 2002, comes amid hopes that years of delicate international negotiations could finally get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme.
In late 2002 Pyongyang kicked out UN weapons inspectors and then pulled out of the global Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, ending an eight-year-old agreement to freeze its nuclear facilities in return for economic aid.
Talks in the six country framework continued until late 2005 when a rift over US sanctions on a North Korea-connect bank in Macau broke out.
Then in October last year Pyongyang stunned the world by testing its first nuclear bomb, but with the result of angering even its sole major ally China, which agreed to international sanctions on the impoverished, isolated country.
The Yongbyon reactor, some 90 kilometres (56 miles) north of Pyongyang, produces raw material for bomb-making plutonium and is at the heart of the North's decades-old nuclear weapons programme.
Its shutdown stops North Korea from producing any more plutonium to swell an existing stockpile estimated by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security at 46-64 kilograms (101-141 pounds).
Some 28-50 kilograms of this is estimated to have been separated, enough for about five to 12 nuclear weapons, the institute estimated in February.
US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said in Tokyo Saturday that the Yongbyon shutdown would only be the first step in the process, and that next North Korea would have to provide more information on all of its nuclear facilities and activities.
"Declaration is one of the early next steps. We would expect a comprehensive list, declaration, to be in a matter of several weeks, possibly a couple of months. We see it as coming before disabling of the facilities," Hill said.
"It's just the first step," he said of the Yongbyon shutdown.
On Friday in Beijing the head of the IAEA team, Adel Tolba, expressed optimism that the process would go smoothly.
"With the kind of help we have got from the DPRK in the last few weeks, we think we will do our job in a successful way," Tolba said. — AFP/ls/ir
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