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The United States on Friday said next week's North Korea visit by nuclear experts from three nations is an "important and welcome step" toward disabling the regime's atomic weapons program.

"It's good news and something we look forward to seeing take place," State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters.

The United States would like to see the weapons disabled by year's end.

"This is an important and welcome step forward," Casey said.

"It will give us the kind of detailed and common understanding that we need to minimize any differences in interpretation of what's been agreed to and ensure the disablement phase moves forward as quickly as possible."

Experts from the U.S., China and Russia will visit Pyongyang Sept. 11-15 to survey North Korea's nuclear sites. Washington was expected to decide on its team over the weekend, likely including representatives from the Energy and State Departments and National Security Council.

Disablement is the second phase of an agreement reached in February between South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan, members of the so-called six-party process. The deal commits Pyongyang to make its key nuclear facilities inoperable and eventually dismantle them, with political and economic incentives provided by other parties.

The countries making up the survey team are the three nuclear states of the six-party talks.

Pyongyang fulfilled the first phase by shutting down the facilities and inviting back inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

But Casey emphasized that next week's visit was "only a step...

only a piece" to implementing the full agreement.

"All various pieces have to be lined up together," he said.

Christopher Hill, the top U.S. nuclear envoy, said the latest development was "a sign of seriousness" by every party to advance denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

It was not yet clear where and what the experts would specifically see when in North Korea, other than the three known installations at Yongbyon, the site of the country's nuclear activities, including a 5-megawatt reactor believed to have been churning out weapons-grade plutonium.

Pyongyang is also suspected of harboring a uranium-based weapons program. While the other governments demand a full accounting, Hill said the uranium issue was unlikely to be covered next week.

"This delegation is probably not going to be looking at uranium facilities at this time," he told reporters in Sydney, where he was attending the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

It also would not be the only visit by nuclear experts to North Korea, Hill said.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (Yonhap)