The American executive director of the international consortium set up to build two nuclear power plants for North Korea as part of a deal to shut down its weapons program is stepping down this week.

Charles Kartman, who guided the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) for four years, is departing Thursday, KEDO spokesperson Brian Kremer said Friday.

Kartman has long advocated dialogue with North Korea to resolve the impasse over its nuclear weapons program.

This has put him at odds since 2001 with more hawkish members of the Bush administration who believe North Korea has broken all previous nuclear disarmament accords by secretly trying to build a highly enriched uranium weapons program.

Some US officials, including many members of Congress, saw the KEDO program as just another payoff to Pyongyang, and the State Department has repeatedly said it sees "no future" for the KEDO project.

The impasse over KEDO mirrors the broader standoff between North Korea and most of the rest of the world over its nuclear weapons ambitions. The CIA believes North Korea may have extracted enough plutonium from its nuclear plants in the 1990s to build about two weapons.

No successor for Kartman has been named so far by KEDO's board, which represents the US, South Korea, Japan and the EU.

The ambitious KEDO project, based in New York, was born in the mid-1990s under the Clinton administration in a scramble to avoid an impending US-North Korean war over Pyongyang's growing nuclear weapons program.

North Korea and the US in 1994 signed a deal under which Pyongyang allowed UN inspectors to monitor its Russian-designed nuclear reactors in exchange for heavy fuel oil shipments and the construction of two tamperproof light-water nuclear power plants to meet its energy needs.

KEDO was formed in 1995 to monitor the 500,000-ton annual fuel oil shipment, sent by the US, and the light-water nuclear reactor project. South Korean construction companies were building the power plants from a US design; South Korea and Japan mainly funded the atomic power project, with the EU providing additional support.

The US$4.6 billion KEDO construction project has been on hold since 2003. The two partly built light-water reactors sit unfinished, one cooling tower partly erected.

In 2002, the US confronted North Korea with evidence that in addition to its plutonium-based nuclear power program, Pyongyang had also sought to secretly develop nuclear weapons by enriching uranium.

(Chinadaily.com.cn via agencies, August 29, 2005)