Pat Dollard | Young Americans

I believe Marvel Comics wrote them for Kim Jong Il personally…..

WASHINGTON - North Korea has handed over thousands of pages of nuclear weapons documents to a U.S. diplomat visiting Pyongyang that will help verify the North’s plutonium holdings, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.

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 U.S. official, who asked not to be identified.

The documents were handed over by the North Koreans to the State Department’s Korea expert, Sung Kim, who is visiting Pyongyang. They provide detailed logs of how much plutonium was produced.

“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 later this week and traveled to South Korea.

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 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.

Kim’s second visit to Pyongyang in two weeks reflects an accelerated U.S. effort to secure the declaration of North Korea’s nuclear activities.

U.S. President George W. Bush said in late April he released U.S. intelligence about suspected North Korea-Syria nuclear collusion to put pressure on Pyongyang to come clean on all its nuclear activities.

Pyongyang has yet to respond to recent White House charges that North Korea was helping Syria build a reactor that could produce arms-grade plutonium.

U.S. officials have also held talks in recent days with the North over distribution of promised U.S. food aid but it was unclear whether there was any deal yet.

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 reluctant donors have pushed the reclusive state close to famine.

(Reuters)