N.Korea, US struggle to bridge nuclear gap

BEIJING, Thursday (Reuters) Washington and Pyongyang sought on Thursday to bridge deep divisions over proposals for disarming North Korea as six-party talks aimed at defusing the North's nuclear ambitions entered a crucial phase.

After a buoyant start to the long-awaited fourth round that saw unprecedented contact between the U.S. and North Korean teams, the parties fell back to more entrenched views on how the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula should unfold.

But the two sides held a one-on-one meeting again on Thursday, after exchanges on Monday and Tuesday, continuing a pattern of unusually frequent exchanges that has marked a change in the U.S. approach and raised hopes for a positive outcome.

"The outcome of DPRK-U.S. bilateral consultations will influence the upcoming result of this round of six-party talks to a large extent," China's official Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed analyst as saying.

On this third day of discussions, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host nation China were trying to scrape together a consensus on agreed principles for the first time in three years of inconclusive talks.

"The chief delegates from the six countries will discuss how they should proceed after Thursday's session as well as the possibility of drafting a joint document," a Japanese delegate said.

In a departure from the format of previous rounds, the session is open-ended. U.S. officials say its purpose is to agree to a set of principles and lay out a schedule for negotiating an eventual agreement. As North Korea staked out a tough position on Wednesday, demanding U.S. concessions, the other five outlined proposals for resolving the crisis.

A South Korean official said Seoul had proposed that the six adopt a joint document setting out two "pillars" or matching promises without specifying the sequence of events - which might help bridge the gulf between Washington and Pyongyang.

Pyongyang demanded Washington remove nuclear weapons from the peninsula. The United States, which keeps more than 30,000 troops in South Korea, says it no longer has such weapons there.