"The six-party talks will resume in Beijing on the 25th of February ... and we hope that these talks will be successful," Powell told reporters outside the State Department without elaboration.

His comments came after a senior US official confirmed that the United States would participate in the talks announced earlier by North Korea and China.

The official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said the US delegation is expected to be led by James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.

Kelly led the US team at the first talks in Beijing last August.

Kelly, along with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, is currently in Japan where they are both completing tours of Asia during which the North Korea crisis has been a major issue.

The North's official Korean Central News Agency announced the February 25 date for the new talks, ending a six-month stalemate since the three days of talks in Beijing.

The talks between the two Koreas, China, Russia, Japan and the United States ended without any accord and North Korea later accused the United States of intransigence toward the follow-up talks.

A senior North Korean official said Pyongyang's announcement reflected an apparent softening of Washington's stance towards the Stalinist state but analysts said the gulf between the two positions remained wide.

The latest nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula erupted 15 months ago when the United States said North Korea had admitted to developing nuclear weapons in breach of a 1994 accord.

The stumbling block to talks had been North Korea's insistence on US concessions including an end to sanctions and a resumption of fuel aid in return for a promise to freeze its nuclear programme.

Washington said it would offer no rewards to the regime branded part of an "axis of evil" by President George W. Bush until it agreed to a complete, irreversible and verifiable end to the nuclear weapons drive.

After talks in Seoul on Monday with South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon and Unification Minister Jeong Se-Hyun, Kelly reaffirmed the US position that North Korea's uranium enrichment programme, which the Stalinist state denies running, must be part of the negotiations.

It was Kelly who went to Pyongyang in October 2002 to confront the Stalinist regime with evidence that it was running a clandestine nuclear weapons programme based on enriched uranium in violation of the 1994 nuclear freeze agreement with the United States.

Washington believes North Korea has one or two crude nuclear bombs made from plutonium diverted from its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang.

North Korea, which expelled nuclear inspectors and pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as the crisis deepened, has denied enriching uranium but said it has reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods at Yongbyon, diverting enough fuel for up to six more bombs.

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