(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-06 17:53

INCHEON, South Korea -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is cooperating with US experts to disable its nuclear weapons-making facilities under an accord with Washington and regional powers and should be able to complete the process by the end of the year, a US diplomat said Tuesday.

US chief negotiator for six-party talks with DPRK Christopher Hill in Tokyo. [Agencies]

"I think we are off to a good start," Sung Kim, the State Department's top expert on Korea, said after arriving in South Korea after a visit to the Yongbyon nuclear site of DPRK.

Kim said DPRK officials were "very cooperative" and that disablement work had begun at three major facilities at the main Yongbyon nuclear complex, located 60 miles north of Pyongyang. That includes a 5-megawatt reactor that can generate plutonium for bombs, and nuclear fuel fabrication and reprocessing plants.

"I hope to achieve all the disablement, at least this phase of disablement, by Dec. 31," he said.

The US and other countries have declined to publicly state how the DPRK's nuclear weapons facilities will be disabled. But the main US envoy to arms talks, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, has said the experts would take steps that would mean it would take at least a year for the reactor to be restarted.

DPRK shut down its sole operational reactor at Yongbyon in July and promised to disable it by year's end.

Kim traveled to Seoul to take part in meeting of US and South Korean defense ministers Wednesday, the US Embassy in Seoul said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was arriving in Seoul from China for previously planned discussions on the US-South Korea alliance.

Some 29,000 US troops remain deployed in the South as a legacy of the Korean War, which ended in 1953 cease-fire that has never been replaced by a peace treaty.