Last week in Beijing, the disarmament talks between North Korea, the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia ended up nowhere after the North Koreans refused to commit in writing to having their past nuclear activities inspected. Apparently, the Bush administration won’t be able to make more progress on the aid-for-disarmament agreement they had managed to reach last year.

According to Associated Press, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that, in spite of this stalemate in negotiations, they won’t give up trying to move things forward until January 20, when President George W. Bush relinquishes his office. Rice believes that the current administration did a pretty good job, leaving future President Barack Obama “a pretty good framework, but we'll continue to see if we can get the North Koreans to write down the assurances that they gave us.”

The U.S. has been negotiating with North Korea for more than 15 years now over the North Korean nuclear program. Things had started going much better in June, when President Bush reduced the harshness of trade sanctions against the Asian state and offered to take North Korea out of the U.S. terrorism blacklist. In exchange, Kim Jong-il should come forward with an accounting of his country’s nuclear bomb-making capabilities.

Rice told reporters that five of the six nations (the ones which were not North Korea) involved in the Beijing negotiations “are completely agreed” on how to check on North Korea’s murky nuclear past. “What happened in Beijing was that the North Koreans at this last session wouldn't write them down,” she said. “But there is, in fact, a verification protocol and a set of assurances that the five are agreed to and that the North Koreans, at least privately before we lifted the terrorist designation, had also agreed to.”

The U.S. Secretary of State also referred to the closing down of the Yongbyon reactor as “an important step forward”. “But we have a lot of questions about the highly enriched uranium route for North Korea”, Rice said. “We have a lot of questions about proliferation, and we believe that the mechanism of the six parties and an associated verification protocol will be the best way to resolve those questions and to get to the bottom of the entire nature of the North Korean program.”