U.S. to Delist North Korea As Sponsor Of Terrorism

'Brazenly' Helping Syria

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Bush: Important Step in North Korean Relations

President Bush says North Korea handing over a long-awaited accounting of its nuclear work to Chinese officials on Thursday is "a step closer in the right direction."

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North Korea will be a major foreign policy challenge for the next U.S. president.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican presidential candidate, cautioned Thursday that destruction of Yongbyon's cooling tower is still only a "modest step" and added: "It is important to remember our goal has been the full, permanent and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Washington must maintain diplomatic and economic pressure on the North until it fulfills all its obligations under six-nation talks, he said.

McCain's Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), said that outstanding questions about the nuclear program must be answered and that he supported "direct and aggressive diplomacy" with the North.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed the hope the North Koreans would "seize" the current opportunity to "improve relations with the United States -- as well as their neighbors -- by faithfully fulfilling their obligations." He added: "If they do their part, I am confident that we will do ours."

Some of the toughest criticism came from Republicans. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said in a statement that "even while negotiating the agreement announced today, Pyongyang continued to brazenly assist another state sponsor of terrorism, Syria, in the development of an illicit nuclear program until an Israeli airstrike destroyed the facility in the Syrian desert last September."

North Korea has agreed to verification principles that will allow outside experts to confirm the accuracy and completeness of information contained in the declaration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters Thursday in Kyoto, where she had come for a meeting of foreign ministers of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.

Early next week, diplomats from the six countries that are party to the nuclear talks -- North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States -- are to meet in Beijing. They will begin working out details for verifying the declaration's information and removing the North's plutonium from the country, U.S. officials said.

Bush said Thursday that the disclosure was enough to warrant a relaxation of some of the steps that isolate the government of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

Provisions of the Trading With the Enemy Act will be lifted by proclamation, he said. In addition, North Korea's name will be removed from the list of state terrorism sponsors in 45 days, after congressional notification.

Worries in Japan

While North Korea will no longer be officially considered an enemy, Bush and other officials in his administration emphasized Thursday that a complex web of other U.S. laws and sanctions remains in place, blocking a broad range of aid, trade and commercial activity.

By handing over the disclosure document Thursday, North Korea clears the way for substantial shipments of food, fuel and other aid. Severe food shortages have been predicted in North Korea for this summer; U.S. officials have pledged half a million tons of food.

The decision to remove North Korea from the terrorism list deeply worries Japan, the closest U.S. ally in Asia. It has argued that North Korea must first come clean with full details of its abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and '80s. The fate of eight Japanese whom North Korea has acknowledged kidnapping but who the North says died years ago has become an obsession in Japan.