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South Korea hopes that the six-party nuclear talks will eventually address North Korea's nuclear arsenal and even the highly enriched uranium (HEU) project the North has vehemently denied, South Korea's top nuclear envoy said Friday.

The remarks by Chun Young-woo come against the backdrop of criticism that the agreement signed at the end of the six-day multinational nuclear talks in Beijing Tuesday aims at dismantling the North's plutonium-producing nuclear reactor alone without touching at least several nuclear bombs the North is believed to possess. "This round of talks dealt with what we will do first to achieve our main goal, which is to have North Korea give up all of its nuclear weapons and nuclear programs," Chun said in a forum organized by the Korea Press Foundation.

"But the premise is that we are working to dismantle the North's nuclear weapons and all other related programs," he said.

This week's agreement was a follow-up to a September 2005 statement in which the North agreed to denuclearize in exchange for aid and security guarantees.

During this week's talks, which lasted from last Thursday to Tuesday, North Korea reaffirmed its commitment to denuclearization, but the agreement reached Tuesday only deals with its initial steps in the process.

As a first step toward denuclearization, North Korea is to shut down its nuclear-related facilities at Yongbyon while allowing United Nations nuclear inspectors back to the nuclear complex to seal them off.

Tuesday's six-nation pact also calls on the North to "disable" the nuclear facilities until an unspecified date.

Chun said what would drive North Korea to voluntarily cripple its nuclear facilities at an early date is what he described as an "incentive system."

For shutting down the Yongbyon complex, the North would receive the equivalent of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in emergency relief aid. An additional 950,000 tons of heavy oil or equivalent aid would be provided to the country upon its completion of disabling the nuclear-related facilities.

Despite South Korea's confidence that this deal will go through, there are many loopholes that may drag the nuclear standoff back to where it started.

Chun said the latest nuclear pact requires North Korea to submit a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency a list of all its nuclear programs, including uranium-based ones.

North Korea "must report (the amount of) plutonium it has produced...so we would also have an idea how much progress the country has made on its uranium program," Chun told the forum.

Pyongyang, however, has long denied having a uranium-based program and appears least likely to admit it now.

The nuclear dispute erupted in late 2002 when Washington accused Pyongyang of running a clandestine uranium-based nuclear weapons program in addition to its acknowledged plutonium program.

Seoul, Feb. 16 (Yonhap News)