The US on Wednesday signalled it would put North Korea's purported uranium enrichment programme to one side during this week's long-awaited talks on the communist state's nuclear weapons capacity, underlining Washington's keenness to break the year-long deadlock.

The question of whether Pyongyang has been enriching uranium to weapons grade - as well as running a separate plutonium programme - sparked the current nuclear crisis in 2002 when Washington said Kim Jong-il's regime had privately admitted to doing so.