Rice suggests US willing to blur lines on N. Korean nuclear inventory

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is suggesting that the United States is backing off on a demand that has hung up nuclear disarmament talks with North Korea. North Korea missed a December 31 deadline to produce a detailed inventory of its nuclear programs and describe its past actions to spread nuclear activity. Negotiations have been stalled since then in a dispute about how specific, and how public, those lists had to be. Now Rice seems to be saying that the exact contents of the list are less important than an assurance that the US and other nations can check up on the North to make sure it revealed what it was supposed to reveal.