Today the U.S. asked North Korea not to set preconditions before the talks that would in effect make them useless:

The United States urged North Korea not to set preconditions to upcoming nuclear talks after the Stalinist state said Washington must normalize relations with it for any progress at the meetings. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said North Korea should make the “strategic decision” to abandon its nuclear weapons drive for better relations with the United States and the rest of the international community. “If they make that decision, they can start to realize better relations with the international community and start to realize some of the benefits of coming into the international community,” he said. “And they need to make the strategic decision. But no one should be coming into the talks with any preconditions,” McClellan told reporters.

Meanwhile, according to Chinese press reports, North Korea is claiming that it:

… is willing to resolve a crisis over its nuclear arms program at next week’s six-party talks in Beijing, but said normalizing relations with Washington was key to a deal… “Not a single nuclear weapon will be needed for us if the U.S. nuclear threat is removed and its hostile policy of ‘bringing down the DPRK’s system’ is withdrawn,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

None of this is surprising or new, a sort of low-level talks brinkmanship. Personally, if North Korea will allow full inspections and agree to U.S. terms on disarmament, it is worth it to normalize relations and give them a security guarantee. Why? Those things are very, very easy to reverse - completely reverse - should North Korea once again break the deal.

One major obstacle would be the U.S. congress, due to both North Korea’s human rights abuses (past and present), being on the list of terrorist sponsoring nations, and not wanting to reward nuclear blackmail. I would argue that North Korea is a special case only because it can annihilate Seoul before we could annihilate Kim Jong-il’s army. Iran, for instance, should not look for such a deal.

My prediction is; nothing much will come of these talks. I could be, and hope I am, wrong on this. Probably noting will happen until Kim Jong-il dies, of old age or whatever.