North Korea hands over nuclear documents

North Korea has handed over thousands of pages of nuclear weapons documents to a US diplomat visiting Pyongyang, a senior US official said.

The official 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 North Koreans have handed them over as part of the verification effort with respect to their eventual declaration of their plutonium holdings," said the senior US official, who declined to be named according to department rules.

The documents were handed over to the State Department's Korea expert, Sung Kim, who is on a visit to Pyongyang. They provide detailed logs of how much plutonium was produced, the official said.

"This documentation, consisting of thousands of pages, will be essential to verifying North Korea's plutonium holdings," added the official.

He said the United States would carefully go through the documents after Kim and his team left Pyongyang.

North Korea tested a nuclear bomb in 2006.

The 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.

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.

The United States is part of six-party talks aimed at getting North Korea to eventually give up all nuclear weapons and programs under a 2005 multilateral agreement.

The agreement to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula was reached among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.