WASHINGTON - THE United States is open to sending an envoy to Pyongyang if North Korea shows it is serious about giving up nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama's top Asia adviser said on Friday.

North Korea has stepped up pressure on the United States to agree to meet one-on-one, announcing this week it had produced more bomb-making plutonium.

Jeff Bader, the senior director for East Asian Affairs on the White House's National Security Council, said the United States wanted proof the communist state was committed to six-nation denuclearisation talks.

'If we see that, then there is no problem with bilateral contacts either in Pyongyang or elsewhere,' Mr Bader said at the Brookings Institution ahead of Mr Obama's trip to Asia next week. 'We're less interested in process than we are in outcome.'

Two newspapers, South Korea's Hankyoreh and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun, have quoted unnamed sources saying that Stephen Bosworth, the US special representative on North Korea, has agreed to go to Pyongyang in late November.

Mr Bader said no such decision had been made. -- AFP