US could drop N.Korea sanctions before verification

WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that verifying any North Korean nuclear declaration would take time and suggested Washington may drop some sanctions on Pyongyang before this is complete.
Separately, a senior U.S. official said an American team would visit North Korea next week to discuss how to verify the "complete and correct" accounting of its nuclear programs that Pyongyang was due to deliver by Dec. 31.
North Korea's failure to produce the declaration has bogged down a 2005 multilateral deal under which the poor, communist state committed to abandon all nuclear weapons and programs in exchange for diplomatic and economic incentives.
The declaration has been held up partly because of Pyongyang's reluctance to discuss any transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, notably Syria, as well as to account for its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment.
Uranium enrichment could provide North Korea with a second way to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons in addition to its plutonium-based program, which it used to test an atomic device in October 2006.
Under the second-phase of the six-party deal, once North Korea has produced its nuclear declaration, the United States is expected to relieve it of sanctions under the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list and Trading With the Enemy Act.
In the third phase, North Korea is expected to dismantle its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and to abandon all nuclear weapons in exchange for further economic and diplomatic benefits.
"Verification takes some time because these are complex programs, this is a nontransparent society, there is a history here of surprises and so it will take some time -- even past the second phase -- for verification to completely play out," Rice told reporters at a news conference.
"Just because we ... believe obligations may have been met in the second phase, if there is evidence as we are into the third phase that something was not true ... there is always the ability and the absolute intention to react," she added.
The agreement to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula was reached among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.