"We have not toughened our stance. Our stance is exactly what it was before," the official said.

"This needs to be seen as a step in a process, that the success or failure will be judged at a later point in the process," the official said.

"If the talks are less than completely successful, we will continue to try to work along that line. There's a great deal of patience and resolve, certainly on our side."

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the outcome could be "anything that begins to move this process along the way."

The remarks came one day after senior US arms control envoy John Bolton warned that Pyongyang's prolonged silence about its uranium enrichment program -- which could lead to a nuclear bomb -- could jeopardize diplomatic efforts to solve the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.

The talks, the first in six months, are set to resume February 25 and are expected to last three days. They bring together the two Koreas, China, Russia, the United States and Japan in a bid to break the impasse over the 16-month North Korean nuclear crisis.

The standoff began in October 2002 when the United States said North Korea had admitted running a clandestine nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium in violation of a 1994 nuclear freeze accord.

Pyongyang has denied the claims by Washington, while reactivating its once-frozen nuclear facilities producing weapons-grade plutomium to cope with what it calls a possible US "war of aggression."

The Stalinist state has offered to freeze its plutonium-producing facilities if it gets US concessions, including a resumption of energy aid to Pyongyang and a security guarantee.

WAR.WIRE