North Korea Hands Over Nuclear Records to U.S.

WASHINGTON — North Korea handed detailed nuclear weapons records to America yesterday, an important peek into the 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," a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said. An American diplomat collected the eight boxes of records during a three-day visit to Pyongyang. Mr. McCormack said getting the papers was the main reason for the trip.

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