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 Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei said as part of the agreement, the U.S. will take the lead in seeing that the facilities are disabled and will fund those initial activities.
"The DPRK agreed to disable all existing nuclear facilities subject to abandonment under the Sept. 2005 joint statement and Feb. 13 agreement.
"The disablement of the five megawatt experimental reactor at Yongbyon, the reprocessing plant at Yongbyon and the nuclear fuel rod fabrication facility at Yongbyon will be completed by 31 December 2007," Wu said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The agreement came after negotiations last week in Beijing involving China, the U.S., Japan, Russia and South and North Korea. It puts in writing a verbal promise that North Korean negotiator Kim Kye Gwan gave to U.S. envoy Christopher Hill a month ago.
Six-party talks on North Korea have dragged on for four years but if ultimately successful would roll back a nuclear program that a year ago allowed North Korea to detonate a nuclear device and that experts say may have produced more than a dozen nuclear bombs.
North Korea is required to disable its sole functioning reactor at Yongbyon in exchange for economic aid and political concessions under a February deal reached through the six-party talks. In July, the North closed Yongbyon, as well as other facilities, ahead of their disablement.
Once there is a six-party agreement, Hill said on Tuesday in New York, the U.S. expects the process of disabling the reactor to get under way "in a matter of weeks." The U.S. wants the dismantling process so thorough that a nuclear facility could not be made operational for at least 12 months.
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 "We will then be able to move to what we hope will be a final phase," Hill said. "That is in the calendar year 2008 which will deal with the actual abandonment of the fissile material."
Hill said the North -- officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK
-- has about 110 pounds of fissile material harvested from the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, and will have to declare exactly how much. The U.S. also wants to resolve concerns about the North's uranium enrichment program, he said.
The 110 pounds of fissile material and the North's nuclear weapons are key issues, Hill said.
"In short, we have a long way to go," he said.
"We have to get denuclearization -- complete, full denuclearization," Hill said. "Partial success is not success."
"I have to make sure the DPRK understands that they've got to give up the fissile material and the weapons," he said, and that means talking to the army and likely dealing with some people who don't want to take "that very necessary last step."
Hill said that "if we don't get that last step, we don't have a process. We can't get anything done unless there is denuclearization."
[Associated Press]
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