The Hill News

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was in Pyongyang on Saturday on a four-day trip to deliver proposals on how to resolve conflict on the Korean peninsula.

According to CNN, which was traveling with Richardson, Richardson said he had a "good meeting" with North Korea's top nuclear negotiator, though the proposals presented weren't described. 

Richardson told Wolf Blitzer that he made a series of offers in Saturday's meeting "that he thinks if implemented could ease the crisis, which by all accounts right now is the most serious crisis on the Korean peninsula since the 1953 armistice which ended the Korean war."

The trip comes as South Korea had planned military drills around Yeonpyeong Island, which North Korea struck in an artillery barrage nearly a month ago, killing four. But bad weather forced the south to delay the exercises, which have angered the North, for a day or two.

"This is a tinderbox. Right now, my objective is to say -- tamp things down," Richardson said. "Let's cool things down. No response. Let the exercises take place. On all sides, I'm urging restraint."

While meeting with a vice minister in North Korea's foreign ministry and scheduled to sit down with a general on Sunday, there was no indication that Richardson would meet with dictator Kim Jong-Il or his twentysomething heir apparent, Kim Jong-Un.