ATTENTION -quotes, details ///

SEOUL, Jan 29 (AFP - South Korea's defense ministry on Thursday urged North Korea to disclose and destroy its nuclear weapons programmes but said there was little hope the Stalinist state would fully comply.

Calling for stepped up surveillance of North Korea, the ministry said Pyongyang should follow the Libyan model and abandon its quest for nuclear weapons, but acknowledged that the regime of Kim Jong-Il was unlikely to do so.

"Chances are slim that North Korea will completely give up its nuclear weapons given the North Korean regime's characteristics," the ministry said in a policy report on the nuclear crisis.

It predicted a bumpy road ahead for efforts to resolve the 15-month-old crisis amid a renewed drive to reconvene six-party talks bringing together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

"Lots of conflicts and difficulties are expected in the course of settling the North Korean nuclear problem," the report said.

Security surveillance of North Korea will be heightened as the crisis plays out, the report added.

The crisis erupted in October 2002 when Washington confronted North Korea with evidence it was developing an enriched-uranium programme. Pyongyang disputes the US contention that it admitted to pursuing the program, but has since boasted of possessing a nuclear deterrent.

The defense ministry said in the report that North Korea's deterrent was based on plutonium from its Yongbyon reactor frozen under the 1994 Agreed Framework but revived last year as the nuclear crisis deepened.

Washington says North Korea diverted enough plutonium before the 1994 freeze to make two crude nuclear bombs. Pyongyang has since said it has reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods stored at Yongbyon, yielding enough plutonium for up to six more bombs

That claim has not been verified but US and South Korean intelligence sources say some reprocessing appears to have taken place.

Following an inconclusive first round of six-way talks in Beijing in August, North Korea recently offered to re-freeze the plutonium producing plant as a first step to resolving the crisis in return for concessions from Washington.

The defense ministry report said that any North Korean atomic freeze should include all of its nuclear programmes.

"North Korea's nuclear freeze must include all nuclear activities including its enriched uranium programme and must require verification," it said.

"It is in North Korea's interests to trustfully and voluntarily disclose and destroy nuclear programmes following Libya."

Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi agreed last month to end Tripoli's quest for weapons of mass destruction.

The report came amid an upsurge of diplomacy as two top US officials visited the region for nuclear crisis talks.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was due in Beijing from Tokyo later Thursday for talks with Chinese foreign ministry officials and US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs was expected in Seoul on Sunday and Tokyo on Monday.

Meanwhile South Korean Unification Ministry Jeong Se-Hyun said Thursday he has detected "good signs of movement" on pushing for a second round of six-way nuclear crisis talks.

Jeong, Seoul's chief delegate to cabinet-level talks with North Korea, reaffirmed that the nuclear issue would top the agenda to be discussed at a new round of inter-Korean talks to open next week.

"Responsible for persuading North Korea to come to the second round of six-way talks... we should advise and recommend North Korea to respond in a more reasonable way," Jeong said in a regular briefing.

WAR.WIRE