SEOUL, South Korea - Top diplomats from the U.S. and North Korea will meet next week along with their counterparts from regional nuclear talks, the State Department said Friday.

It will be the highest level of contact between the countries amid recent progress on Pyongyang's disarmament.

The talks will include U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun.

They will take place on the sidelines of an Asian security meeting in Singapore that all the countries' foreign ministers had already planned to attend, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

"On the sidelines of that meeting, I would expect that there will be an informal ministerial level meeting of the six-party ministers," McCormack said, though he added the contacts would not yield "specific outcomes."

The talks would be the first time the countries' top diplomats have met since the six-nation arms negotiations began in 2003.

Along with the U.S. and North Korea, the arms talks include China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. McCormack added that it would be the first time Rice would meet with a North Korean foreign minister.

The meeting comes as North Korea has promised to wrap up the disabling of its main nuclear facility by later this year, meaning it would not be able to easily resume making plutonium for bombs.

However, the sides have not yet agreed on details for the more critical next step - dismantling the North's facilities and ridding the country of nuclear bombs and radioactive material to make them.

The foreign ministers' meeting was agreed to in earlier accords from the talks, but was delayed as the talks hit a deadlock over the North's pledge to submit a declaration of its nuclear programs.

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