A US envoy was due Wednesday to pursue efforts to bring North Korea back to stalled six-nation nuclear disarmament negotiations, but experts said Pyongyang has a different agenda for his visit.

Stephen Bosworth arrived in the communist state Tuesday for the first official meeting between the two countries since US President Barack Obama took office in January, pledging direct diplomacy with adversaries.

Washington says Bosworth's sole mission is to persuade the North to return to the six-party talks, warning that if it does not, Pyongyang can expect continued "very strong enforcement" of sanctions.

The State Department said Bosworth and his six-strong team were likely to have held talks Tuesday but their "primary meetings" would be on Wednesday.

It said it did not expect to hear from Bosworth until his scheduled return to Seoul Thursday. The North's official media had no reports Wednesday on the visit.

Bosworth's trip caps a turbulent year. Stung by international censure of its long-range rocket launch, the North in April declared the six-party talks "dead". It later announced resumed production of weapons-grade plutonium.

In May Pyongyang staged its second nuclear test and followed up with a series of missile launches in July, attracting tougher UN sanctions.

Later in the year the North began striking a softer note in what some analysts saw as a bid to soften the sanctions.

In October it told key ally China it was ready to return to the six-nation talks, but only if direct dialogue with the United States proves satisfactory.

Obama has offered the North security and prosperity if it honours its 2005 commitment to give up nuclear weapons.

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley on Tuesday termed the North a "repressive regime" which was struggling to feed its people but was nevertheless cracking down on private commerce.

Within the six-party forum, he said, the United States could consider helping it end its isolation and normlise ties with the world.

Pyongyang, however, has long sought direct talks with Washington in preference to the six-party forum launched in 2003 which also groups South Korea, Japan, Russia and China.

It says it needs a nuclear arsenal in the face of US "hostility" and maintains that a peace deal with Washington formally ending the 1950-53 war is key to resolving the nuclear standoff.

Charles Pritchard, a former US negotiator with Pyongyang who visited the North last month, said Tuesday he doubted Bosworth's meetings would yield a breakthrough.

Pritchard said a North Korean official "on a number of occasions and in a number of ways told us if Ambassador Bosworth were to come and simply and suddenly say, 'return to six-party talks', that that in fact would be a waste of time."

Pritchard told a Washington news conference that the foreign ministry official, Ri Gun, instead sought talks on a peace treaty with the United States, which fought for the South in the war that ended only in an armistice.

Ri said North Korea needed a treaty to end the "inconsistency" in policy between different US administrations, according to Pritchard.

"I think this is a negotiating ploy to avoid the discussion and commitment to come to six-party talks," he added.

Scott Snyder, director of the Centre for US-North Korea Policy at the Asia Foundation, took the same trip as Pritchard.

He said he forecast a "difficult conversation" this week because the North wants to be treated as a nuclear power after its second test — something which Washington insists will never happen.

"Essentially, Pyongyang's new offer — as a 'nuclear weapons state' — has shifted from the denuclearisation for normalisation deal at the core of the 2005 Six Party Joint Statement to 'Peace first; denuclearisation, maybe later'," Snyder wrote in the centre's newsletter.

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