But all this is "pursuant to progress in denuclearization," the document says.
Egan also claims that he once proposed a plan whereby the Koreans would sell their nuclear weapons to the U.S., achieving denuclearization and economic recovery in the same stroke.
"If a peace treaty is signed, it will help resolve hostile relations between North Korea and the United States and speed up the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the North's state-run news agency, K.C.N.A.
"We encourage North Korea to work for peace and security in the region and take the steps necessary to allow the resumption of the six-party talks on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula".
Speaking at a news conference, he said that the United States would defend its South Korean and Japanese allies if there was conflict, that the international community would never accept the North as a nuclear weapons state, and that Washington was willing to resume long-stalled negotiations but only if the North Koreans agreed to move seriously on denuclearization.
But Mr. Lee's get-tough policy has been a hard sell with Beijing, which values North Korea's stability, perhaps even more than its denuclearization.
But she has yet to elaborate on how she will reconcile that with the policy of Washington and her predecessor, Mr. Lee, a fellow conservative whose insistence on the North's denuclearization as a precondition of greater economic largess was met only with more provocations from the North.
"When the leaders of the two countries meet reporters, they will say they have reached some consensus on denuclearization of the peninsula," predicted Wang Junsheng, professor of Asian affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Reporting on the same meeting, however, the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency made no direct mention of denuclearization or supporting China's efforts to reconvene six-nation talks.
He said that the talks "without an understanding and agreement from the North Koreans to both end their behavior as they exhibited last week, but also to come to the table with a seriousness of purpose on the denuclearization issue — without that seriousness of purpose, they're just a P.R. activity".
Sketching out his approach in his meeting later in the day with reporters, Mr. Kerry said that before talks could begin, North Korea needed to take tangible steps to demonstrate that it was serious about denuclearization.
