Reports of the recent talks in Beijing about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program all have stressed the deadlock. And even last week’s welcome offer from Bush administration officials to gradually ease sanctions came with the warning that the sanctions would remain until North Korea started to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. And North Korea wouldn’t discuss dismantling it until the United States had agreed to a nonaggression pact.

For some reason, no one reported that North Korea proposed a four-stage negotiating plan. While some details may need reworking, it sets forth what appears to be a reasonable basis for further talks and an eventual peaceful settlement of the prolonged dispute. The North Korean chief negotiator, Kim Yong Il, vice minister of foreign affairs, presented the proposal in his keynote speech on Aug. 27. The text has been available on the official North Korean Internet site since Aug. 29.

Here is the proposal, which involves successive sets of simultaneous concessions by the two sides:

Stage 1: The United States would resume its shipments of heavy fuel

oil and “sharply increase” humanitarian food aid, while North Korea would “declare its will to scrap its nuclear program.”

Stage 2: North Korea would “refreeze” its “nuclear facility and nuclear substance” (meaning processed plutonium) and permit monitoring and inspection of them, while the United States would conclude “a nonaggression treaty” with North Korea and compensate it for the loss of electricity caused by the suspension of construction of two light water nuclear power reactors. They were to have been completed this year under a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration.

Stage 3: North Korea would “settle the missile issue when diplomatic relations are opened” with North Korea and Japan. The statement said it would “put on ice the missile test fire and stop its export.” North Korea’s export of missiles has been another sore point.

Stage 4: “And we will dismantle our nuclear facility from the time the LWRs (light water reactors) are completed.”

Obvious points of objection from the U.S. point of view are the proposal for a cash payment and the lapse of several years before the nuclear facilities are finally dismantled. Generous food aid might conceivably be substituted for cash compensation. And a freeze backed up by international inspection and monitoring would certainly be better than the current unlimited expansion of the nuclear weapons program and possible export of nuclear materials or technology.

The same dispatch by the Korean Central News Service quoted the chief Chinese negotiator as calling the North Korean proposal “a positive, constructive, just and rational offer.” It quoted the head of the Russian delegation as saying that Russia “is interested in ensuring denuclearization and durable peace on the Korean peninsula.”

While the North Korean proposal may go nowhere, the American people should at least have been informed about it. Talking beats fighting, and the ball is in the U.S. court.