Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill met with North Korea's Kim Kye-Gwan on Monday night amid preparations for two days of meetings involving host China and other nations beginning later this week.

"I felt, based on this very business-like meeting last night... we will get through the denuclearisation working group with some very specific ideas of how to proceed, and that will be good," Hill told reporters.

He was to hold further talks Tuesday afternoon with Wu Dawei, China's representative in the six-nation effort to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons.

Hill said he hoped to meet also with the Japanese and South Korean envoys ahead of the main talks opening Thursday in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang.

The Shenyang talks are aimed at agreeing on a sequence of events for North Korea to declare and eventually disable all of its nuclear weapons programmes.

It is the second key phase of a six-nation accord signed in February that saw the North agree to end its atomic programmes in return for fuel aid, security guarantees and diplomatic concessions.

The talks are considered vital to further progress in the next round of full six-nation disarmament meetings in Beijing tentatively set for early September.

North Korea honoured its initial commitments last month by closing its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and opening its doors to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.

But Hill insisted Monday that North Korea must come clean on all of its nuclear weapons programmes for the overall process to move forward.

The United States suspects the North, which conducted its first atomic weapons test in October, of running a secretive highly enriched uranium programme in addition to the programmes it has already admitted to.

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