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At the end of another two-month-long tug-of-war on a tight rope, North Korea and the United States finally struck a deal to place back on the track their talks aimed at Pyongyang's scrapping of its program to develop, deploy and sell nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, at the U.S.'s lifting of all sanctions against the North, and ultimately at establishing diplomatic relations between them. James Rubin, spokesman of the U.S. State Department, on Jan. 31 said North Korea had agreed to send a high-level delegation to the United States in March, an "important step forward" in improving relations between Washington and Pyongyang.

A day earlier a spokesman of the North Korean Foreign Ministry simply said the two countries, in vice ministerial-level negotiations in Berlin Jan. 22-28, agreed to "reopen vice ministerial-level talks" in New York in late February. The (North) Korean Central News Agency, Pyongyang's mouthpiece, said the agenda in the scheduled New York talks will be, among other things, the removal of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from the "list of countries supporting terrorism" for the purpose of creating before anything else favorable conditions for the Washington higher-level talks.

The recent Berlin talks came two months after unsuccessful talks in the same place. The negotiations in mid-November last year were held two months after the two countries reached an agreement, under which North Korea will shelve the test-firing of its ballistic missiles as long as Washington continues talks with it for the normalization of diplomatic relations. For the deal, the U.S. promised to supply an additional large amount of grain to the famine-stricken North.

Covering the KCNA report on the recent Pyongyang-Washington talks in Berlin, the Associated Press on Jan. 30 said North Korea indicated "it would send a high-level delegation to the United States if Washington removes it from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism." But Rubin was cool to the North Korean statement. "From our standpoint there is no new condition," Rubin said. "We have not promised to take them off the terrorism list."

The next day, on Jan. 31, the U.S. State Department spokesman mentioned Pyongyang's agreement to send a high-level delegation to the United States in March that will be, perhaps, headed by Kang Sok-ju, first vice foreign minister and a close aide to North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il. Kang is the North Korean official who led Pyongyang's delegates for talks with Washington in 1994, which produced the Agreed Framework, the benchmark agreement between the two counties. In the 1994 deal, the U.S. promised to provide the North with light-water reactors with the generating capacity of 2 million kw as long as Pyongyang freezes its nuclear weapons development program.

In the course of implementing the agreement, there arose some problems, including the U.S. failure to deliver heavy oil to the North in time and the suspicions regarding the North's resumption of nuclear weapons development in an underground site. In an effort to solve these problems, U.S. President Bill Clinton sent his special envoy to North Korea in late May last year. During his four-day stay in Pyongyang, Perry met Kang for three days to discuss an array of issues pending between the two countries, which have remained hostile since the Korean War in the early 1950s.

Pyongyang's Jan. 30 statement, however, did not mention the sending of its high-level delegation to the U.S., let alone its leader. Some North Korea watchers in Seoul believe the two countries have yet to put final touches on the Berlin agreement, which they will probably do at the New York talks scheduled for late this month.

Noteworthy is a statement issued by North Korean Deputy Premier Cho Chang-dok on Feb. 3, which called on the U.S. to compensate for "unprecedented" power shortage in the North today that was caused by "the frozen construction of nuclear power facilities and the delay in the construction of light-water reactors." "If the U.S. does not fulfill its duty and continues its policy to suffocate us, we have no option but to take actions of our own style," said the statement, which came in the form of an interview with the KCNA.

The New York talks — and the probable talks in Washington later — might be the start of another round of tough negotiations between North Korea and the U.S., although that might be necessary for the normalization of their ties, as some analysts in Seoul believe. This is so because there are an array of serious issues to be resolved. Pyongyang, for example, still is sticking to its decades-old position that the "U.S. imperialists" invaded Korea to touch off the Korean War in the early 1950s and that they are required to withdraw their troops from South Korea, while Washington is firm in its position to maintain its troops there to block another invasion of the South by the North.