North Korea on Tuesday signaled it could return to nuclear disarmament talks it had declared dead six months ago, but a report it was near restoring its atomic plant underlined the secretive state would keep the stakes high.

Leader Kim Jong-il told Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on a rare visit to Pyongyang that he first wanted talks with the US. The North sees such talks as key to ending its status as a global pariah that it argues gives it no choice but to have a nuclear arsenal.

“The hostile relations between the DPRK (North Korea) and the United States should be converted into peaceful ties through the bilateral talks without fail,” the North’s KCNA news agency quoted Kim as saying.

“We expressed our readiness to hold multilateral talks, depending on the outcome of the DPRK-US talks. The six-party talks are also included in the multilateral talks.”

In April, a month before its second nuclear test, North Korea said the six-party talks — between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the US — were finished for good. It walked away from those talks last December. This is the first time it has suggested it was might return to what has been the only international forum to try to make the North give up dreams of becoming a nuclear warrior in return for massive aid to fix an economy broken by years of mismanagement.

One analyst said it boiled down to impoverished North Korea hoping to convince Washington to end its economic squeeze and the US wanting to be certain that Pyongyang will not sell any nuclear weaponry abroad.

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