BEIJING – Arms negotiators failed Friday to set a firm deadline for North Korea to disable its nuclear facilities following the shutdown of its reactor, but top envoys planned to meet again in early September.

Chinese envoy Wu Dawei said working groups would meet before the end of August to discuss technical details for the North’s next steps: declaring and disabling its nuclear programs.

Those sessions will be followed by a resumption of talks involving top envoys in early September to “work out the roadmap,” after which foreign ministers from all six countries will convene, Wu said.

At the latest round, the North “reiterated that it will earnestly implement its commitments to a complete declaration of all nuclear programs and disablement of all existing nuclear facilities,” he said.

The statement after three days of talks in Beijing failed to include any deadline for the North to actually proceed with those steps, as the U.S. had sought at the start of the session.

The U.S. insisted earlier Friday that North Korea could still disable its nuclear facilities by the end of the year, a deadline the main American envoy had hoped would be put in writing this week.

“Ultimately, we decided not to put in deadlines _ yet,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said. “We’ll put in deadlines when we have the working groups and we know precisely what we’re talking about.”

The U.S. diplomat nonetheless said he maintained hopes for quick progress.

“With a little luck, we can wrap this up by the end of the year,” Hill said before departing Beijing. “It’s going to be difficult, but we’ll do our best.”

South Korea also sought to put a positive spin on the meeting.

“North Korea said it would not drag its feet in moving on to the next phase and would declare everything it has,” Seoul’s envoy Chun Yung-woo said. “In that sense, there has been considerable achievement.”

But Japan _ which has refused to provide any energy aid to the North under earlier agreements until Pyongyang addresses a dispute over abductions of Japanese citizens _ expressed some disappointment with the latest session’s results.

“It was unfortunate that we could not reach a consensus on details,” envoy Kenichiro Sasae said.

North Korea has begun receiving 50,000 tons of oil from South Korea as a reward for shutting down its reactor at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It is to eventually receive the equivalent of a total of 1 million tons for disabling its nuclear facilities under a February agreement among the six countries at the talks _ China, Japan, Russia, the United States and the two Koreas.

Hill said Pyongyang had an incentive to keep moving on disarmament to get the promised aid.

“Further fuel oil is contingent on further denuclearization,” he said.

The reactor shutdown was the first step North Korea has taken to scale back its nuclear ambitions since the crisis began in late 2002, when a 1994 disarmament deal fell apart and the North reactivated its reactor to produce plutonium for bombs. Confirming it could build a weapon, the North conducted its first-ever nuclear test detonation in October.

Associated Press writers Jae-soon Chang, Alexa Olesen and Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)