Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, has said that he is willing to return to international negotiations on destroying his country's nuclear weapons, but only if he is satisfied with the result of prior talks with the United States.

In a rare meeting on Monday with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister, Mr Kim expressed "our readiness to hold multilateral talks, depending on the outcome of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK]-US talks”, according to a report yesterday by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). He said: "The hostile relations between the DPRK and the United States should be converted into peaceful ties through the bilateral talks without fail."

Many observers doubt that Mr Kim has any intention of giving up his small nuclear arsenal and his form of words suggests that any final resolution is still a long way off. But it represents a softening of North Korea’s earlier furious statement that it would never return to the Chinese-hosted Six Party Talks, after Beijing joined fellow members of the United Nations Security Council in condemning its launch of a long-range rocket in April.

“Our efforts to attain the goal of de-nuclearising the peninsula remain unchanged,” KCNA quoted him as telling Mr Wen, who spent three days in Pyongyang. “The de-nuclearisation of the peninsula was the behest of [North Korea’s founder and Mr Kim’s father] President Kim Il Sung … the Six Party Talks are also included in the multilateral talks.”

Unlike its predecessor, which resisted for years the notion of honouring Mr Kim with bilateral talks, the Obama administration had said that it is ready to deal directly with the North Koreans. The next step is likely to be a visit to Pyongyang by Stephen Bosworth, the US special representative to the country.

“Or goal [is] North Korea will return to the Six Party Talks,” the US State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, said on Monday. “We, of course, encourage any kind of dialogue that would help us lead to our ultimate goal that's shared by all the partners in the Six Party Talks, which, of course, is the complete and verifiable de-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.”

On Monday, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that American and South Korean intelligence authorities believe that, after partially dismantling its nuclear facilities last year during a period of rare progress in the talks, Pyongyang is close to restoring them.

A South Korean MP revealed that an intelligence report says that Kim Jong Un, the youngest son of Kim Jong Il, has been appointed to a senior post in the ruling Workers’ Party to prepare him to succeed to the leadership.

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