US receives N. Korea's key nuclear documents

WASHINGTON - North Korea handed detailed nuclear weapons records to the United States yesterday, an important peek into the isolated regime's bomb making past but not enough to answer criticism that the Bush administration is grasping for a disarmament deal at any cost.

The technical logs from North Korea's shuttered plutonium reactor would give outside experts a yardstick to measure whether the North is telling the truth about a bomb program that the poor nation has agreed to trade away for economic and political rewards.

"Our top three priorities are going to be verification, verification, verification," said Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman.

A US diplomat collected the eight boxes of records during a three-day visit to Pyongyang. McCormack said getting the papers was the main reason for the trip.

Privately, State Department officials hope the roughly 18,000 secret papers will build confidence among conservative critics of the recent, relatively flexible US posture toward North Korea, a dictatorship President Bush once termed part of an "axis of evil."

The Bush administration's comprehensive 2007 disarmament deal with the North requires some congressional approval, and GOP unease is growing.

The North is five months past a deadline to produce a complete record of its weapons programs or an alleged side business selling nuclear know-how to other countries, and US officials announced no new deadline for the summary.

The North says it met its obligations, but has also agreed to a tentative deal to have the North acknowledge US concerns about an illicit uranium program and alleged transfer of nuclear know-how to other nations but would not require it to spell everything out.

The deal would set up a system to verify that North Korea is telling the truth and does not restart banned nuclear activities.