At last, a sign President Bush wants to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Today brings news of a major concession by North Korea that might indicate a new willingness to end its nuclear-weapons program. "North Korea has dropped its insistence on one-on-one talks with the United States," the Associated Press tells us, "and is ready to accept a U.S. proposal for six-nation negotiations" that would involve Japan, China, and Russia, as well as the United States and both Koreas.

The Los Angeles Times similarly leads its story: "North Korea has apparently dropped a key demand and agreed to a U.S. proposal for six-nation talks." CNN: "Washington has long been pushing for multilateral talks but Pyongyang had previously rejected this demand, instead insisting on one-to-one talks with America." And so on.

The puzzling thing about all these stories is that North Korea hasn't changed its position on talks: The North Korean foreign ministry announced it would take part in multilateral nuclear talks back in mid-April and restated this willingness, publicly and privately, in mid-June and again mid-July.

On closer inspection, the new promise of negotiations is the result of a compromise as much from Washington as from Pyongyang—though, for several reasons, U.S. officials would rather keep that part hushed up.

Concerns about a North Korean bomb began to stir last October and escalated to crisis around the New Year, with Pyongyang breaking a 1994 agreement, reached with the Clinton administration, to suspend its nuclear-weapons program.

Initially, North Korea did reject proposals for multilateral talks, insisting that it would meet only in face-to-face talks with the United States.

But on April 12, Pyongyang's state-owned news agency, KCNA, quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying, "The type of dialogue will not matter if the U.S. is ready to change its policy regarding the settlement of the nuclear issue."

And from April 23-25, in a trilateral session that seems already to have been forgotten, United States, North Korean, and Chinese diplomats met in Beijing for a first round of talks (which, in fact, went far less disastrously than some hawkish officials tried to paint them at the time).

On June 10, a U.S. official, speaking on background, told Japanese reporters that North Korea might soon agree to participate in broader talks—to include at least Japan and South Korea—possibly in August. Since Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was in Tokyo on that day, it can be inferred that he or one of his aides was the source.

On July 8, North Korean diplomats held unofficial talks with their American counterparts at the United Nations. A week later, Chinese officials told the Tokyo daily Asahi Shimbun that the North Koreans had said at the meeting that they would agree to five-nation talks (Russia was not yet involved) if Washington guaranteed not to undermine the Pyongyang regime.