Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, offered few details about his upcoming trip, which other agency officials said would likely occur in the second week of March.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hailed the invitation, which came five months after the DPRK tested a nuclear weapon, as a "good beginning".
Still ElBaradei's trip, likely in the second week of March, will mark only an initial step in the long and complex process that the international community hopes will result in stripping the DPRK of its nuclear weapons capabilities and ensuring it remains without such arms.
In a process that one UN official said "could take years," IAEA inspectors would be tasked with re-establishing monitoring of the plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear facility, and then being on site while it is closed and then dismantled.
ElBaradei said he would meet and work with the DPRK authorities on how to "implement the freeze of (nuclear) facilities" and the "eventual dismantlement of these facilities."
"I hope eventually they'll come back to be members of the IAEA," he said of the North, which left at the same time it quit the Nonproliferation Treaty.
CNN
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