NKorea to remain on terror blacklist: US

The United States Monday insisted North Korea would remain on its terrorism blacklist until it fully complied with a deal on disclosing its nuclear program, sidestepping the first chance to remove the hardline communist state from its watch list.

Under US law, Washington can from Monday begin considering removing Pyongyang from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, 45 days after Pyongyang submitted a long awaited declaration of its nuclear program.

But the State Department said it would not delist North Korea in exchange for the disclosure unless Pyongyang accepted a comprehensive mechanism to verify the North's complex atomic program.

"The important point is they haven't produced for us that verification regime that we need to go forward on that issue," department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters when asked about the delisting prospects.

"What we need from the North Koreans is a strong verification regime, that's our policy and it still stands," he said, indicating that negotiations between the two sides had not borne fruit.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura by telephone Monday that no date had been set to take North Korea off the list, Komura said.

After Pyongyang submitted its nuclear declaration on June 26, President George W. Bush announced he had notified the US Congress of his intent to de-list North Korea from the terror blacklist in 45 days.

Officials have insisted that the 45-day notification period is the "minimum period" for Washington to take action and not a deadline as such.

Experts see the deadlock as another stumbling block to efforts to end North Korea's nuclear weapons drive before Bush leaves the White House in January 2009.

"The process has already been protracted and so it is already clear that this administration is not going to be able to achieve its stated goal," said Scott Snyder of the Washington-based Asia Foundation.

"That means that the next administration is going to inherit this problem and it may be possibly what DPRK (North Korea) had intended all along," he said.

North Korea has already shut down its main nuclear reactor and is disabling it as part of a six-nation accord under which the impoverished state will receive diplomatic and security guarantees and energy aid in return for denuclearization.

The verification of the nuclear program is intended to pave the way for dismantlement of reclusive North Korea's atomic arsenal.

The Bush administration has reportedly provided North Korea with a four-page draft verification protocol at the latest round of six-way talks in Beijing last month.

While Pyongyang agreed to general principles for verifying the nuclear declaration, including visits to facilities, review of documents, and interviews with technical personnel, there is no agreement yet on the extent to which access can be provided to international inspectors, Asian diplomats said.

The United States is pushing for a rigorous mechanism to verify the reclusive North Korea's nuclear program and activities.

The Bush administration says it should cover not only Pyongyang's plutonium program -- from which it manufactured bombs, one of which was test fired in 2006 -- but also its sensitive uranium enrichment program and proliferation activities.

North Korea did not answer in its declaration in June about US allegations of its nuclear proliferation to Syria, or claims of a past secret enriched uranium weapons program.

It merely acknowledged in a separate document US concerns about the uranium and proliferation issues and assured it was not engaged in such activities and would not be involved in them in the future.