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By Sue Pleming
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – North Korea handed over more than 18,000 pages of nuclear weapons documents to a U.S. diplomat visiting Pyongyang on Thursday that will help verify its plutonium holdings, senior U.S. officials said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il (C) inspects a sub-unit of the Korean People’s Army unit 350 at an undisclosed location in North Korea in this undated picture taken by North Korea’s official news agency KCNA and distributed by Korea News Service on April 5, 2008. REUTERS/Korea News Service
The officials said the documents were another step toward the goal of getting a full declaration of North Korea’s nuclear activities, which has been delayed since the end of last year.
The documents, between 18,000 and 19,000 pages, were handed over by the North Koreans to the State Department’s Korea expert, Sung Kim, who is visiting Pyongyang, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
“He will bring back with him a significant number of documents relating to North Korea’s plutonium program and we will have an opportunity over the coming days and weeks to assess the significance of these documents,” McCormack said.
Another senior U.S. official, who asked not to be named, said they provided detailed logs of how much plutonium was produced by North Korea.
“This documentation consisting of thousands of pages will be essential to verifying North Korea’s plutonium holdings,” said the senior official.
North Korea tested a nuclear bomb in 2006.
An accord under which North Korea agreed to abandon all its nuclear programs in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits has been bogged down by Pyongyang’s failure to produce a declaration of those programs by the end of last year.
McCormack said it was possible North Korea would soon provide the declaration to China, which chairs six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program.
“We will see if these documents will play a role in that process, but again it is going to be a verification process that plays out over a period of time,” he said.
“Our top three priorities are going to be verification, verification and verification,” he added.
The United States is part of the six-party talks aimed at getting North Korea to give up all nuclear weapons and programs under a 2005 agreement. The agreement to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula was reached among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
A sticking point has been Pyongyang’s reluctance to discuss any transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, notably Syria, as well as its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment.
Last month, the United States released photographs of what it said had been a Syrian nuclear reactor built with North Korean help. The site was destroyed in an Israeli air strike in September.
Kim was on his second visit to Pyongyang in two weeks, reflecting an accelerated U.S. effort to secure the declaration.
U.S. President George W. Bush said in late April he released intelligence about the alleged North Korea-Syria nuclear collusion to put pressure on Pyongyang to come clean on all its nuclear activities.
Pyongyang has yet to respond to White House charges that North Korea was helping Syria build the reactor that could produce arms-grade plutonium.
U.S. officials have also held talks in recent days with North Korea over distribution of promised U.S. food aid, but McCormack said those had been inconclusive.
“They went there to take a look at whether or not conditions had changed sufficiently so that we could in good conscience and good faith provide food aid and know that that was going to get to people who need it,” said McCormack.
A previous arrangement was scrapped after the United States said it was unable to monitor the distribution of food aid.
Aid groups said soaring global food prices and donors’ reluctance have helped push the reclusive state close to famine.
Editing by Mohammad Zargham
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