A planned joint statement from the six-nation talks in Beijing aimed at scrapping North Korea's nuclear weapons capabilities will include a South Korean offer to send electricity to the North as a potential reward for denuclearization, the chief U.S. negotiator, Christopher Hill, said Sunday. "The electricity offer of course is in the draft agreement," Hill told reporters after a day of negotiating the proposed statement. South Korea's recent offer to supply two million megawatts of electricity a year to North Korea meant Pyongyang could "get out of this business" of nuclear activities, Hill said earlier.

The South Korean plan was good, Hill said, and the North "has much to work on without talking about nuclear-type things." Hill, who met with South Korea's chief negotiator, Song Min Soon, in the morning, made the comments as the talks were set to enter a second week of bargaining over the joint statement of principles for subsequent, detailed disarmament negotiations. He told reporters that on Monday the negotiators would consider a second draft of the statement written by China, and the statement would include promises of "economic cooperation" if North Korea terminates its nuclear programs.

Japan and Russia are also participating in the talks. North Korea said on Sunday that it may rejoin an international nuclear treaty and accept international inspections of its nuclear facilities, which it wants to keep, "if the nuclear issue finds a satisfactory solution" and the United States accepts "peaceful coexistence." The statement was issued by the country's official press agency, KCNA. The North Korean government may yet reject U.S. demands that it end all its nuclear activities, including power generation, before receiving rewards. But North Korea could at least be lured into signing the joint statement and continuing disarmament talks by South Korea's offer, analysts said.

"It was a very astute move," Kent Calder, an expert on Northeast Asian energy politics at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, said of the offer. "It does provide something that's badly needed by North Korea, given its desperate energy situation, but from a South Korean point of view it doesn't compromise Washington." The Bush administration has resisted making direct offers of U.S. aid to North Korea. But while the South Korean offer may have helped persuade the North to return to talks, some experts said looming problems may damage its attractiveness at the negotiating table and threaten its viability.

"It was very much a symbolically driven gesture," said Peter Hayes, the executive director of the Nautilus Institute, a San Francisco-based research group that focuses on North Korea. That country's dilapidated power grid and the plan's unbudgeted costs may endanger it, Hayes and other researchers concluded in a recent report.

South Korea presented the plan to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, in June and publicly announced it on July 12. North Korea has made no official response to Seoul's electricity offer during the talks, but Chung Dong Young, the South Korean unification minister, said Kim told him his country would consider it, and in talks last year North Korea asked for two million megawatts of power in return for curtailing its nuclear plans.

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