"I think that if the United States wants the talks to resume, they will resume," Jin Jingyi, a leading researcher at Beijing University's North Korean Cultural Research Institute, told AFP. "If they don't want the talks to resume, then they won't resume.

"North Korea has said that it is willing to return to the talks, but they first want some signs of US sincerity before they do so."

A third round of talks was held in Beijing in June 2004, but a scheduled fourth round was scuttled last September after North Korea accused Washington of a hostile policy aimed at regime change in Pyongyang.

Since then, North Korea has declared itself a nuclear power, saying it needs atomic weapons to deter a US attack, and has led many to believe that a nuclear weapons test is on the horizon.

Pyongyang has feared a US attack since President George W. Bush named North Korea part of an "axis of evil" after his inauguration in 2000.

Subsequent comments by top US officials calling the communist state an "outpost of tyranny" or Kim an "irresponsible leader" who "runs a police state," have only hardened North Korea's suspicions and resulted in a noisy war of words.

Pyongyang's state-controlled press has retaliated, calling Bush an "imbecile" and a "tyrant" last August just before walking out on the talks, while vilifying Vice President Dick Cheney as a "cruel monster and bloodthirsty beast".

"If only they (the US) would shut their mouths and stop the public insults of Kim Jong Il, then North Korea will come around," said Paul Harris, a political scientist at Hong Kong's Lingnan University who monitors China's efforts to host the six-party talks.

"When Bush called Kim Jong Il 'Mr Kim' last month, it had an immediate impact in a favorable way," Harris told AFP.

The Bush administration was increasingly recognizing that it had to overcome its ideological misgivings of dealing directly with the Stalinist regime and needed to get North Korea back to the table in order to avert a potential nuclear calamity, Harris said.

"As this situation is getting worse, Bush is looking more and more silly," Harris said. "One shouldn't forget that when Bush came to power he said he would never tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea. Now North Korea is saying they have them."

Western diplomats in Beijing said that the talks would have to resume in July or August or Washington was likely to try to bring the issue to the United Nations.

Conversely, if the talks failed, both China and North Korea were willing to wait for a new US administration before seeking a resumption, they said.

According to Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Washington-based Center for International Policy, three rounds of talks have basically come down to arguments over the sequence in which North Korea agrees to scrap its nuclear program.

All sides in the talks - China, North and South Korea, the United States, Japan and Russia - agree that the nuclear weapons program should be scrapped in exchange for mutual diplomatic recognition as well as energy and food aid for North Korea, he said.

The United States wants North Korea to first declare is willingness to dismantle all its nuclear weapons programs, including plutonium and uranium programs, before security assurances, aid and diplomatic recognition are given, Harrison said.

"North Korea is not willing to negotiate concerning the dismantlement or reduction of its nuclear weapons capabilities until the US normalizes economic and diplomatic relations," Harrison said.

To bridge the gap may be difficult, but it would probably result in a partial return to the 1994 Agreed Framework, a deal to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons program that was scrapped in late 2002, he said.

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