U.S. to respond quickly to N. Korea nuclear report

Wed Jun 25, 12:38 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States could move quickly to remove North Korea from its list of terrorism sponsors after Pyongyang issues an expected declaration of its nuclear activities, the White House said on Wednesday.

North Korea, which tested a nuclear device in October 2006, planned to give the long-awaited report to China by Thursday, Japan's Kyodo news agency said earlier this week.

Once North Korea makes the declaration, "it could be quite soon" that the United States would move to remove it from its list of terrorism sponsors, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

"Remember, this was action for action, and this was something that was laid out quite a while ago," she said. She did not give further details.

Removal from the U.S. list would ease trade restrictions and open the way for other cooperation with the United States, and eventually enable North Korea to work with the World Bank and other international institutions.

President George W. Bush discussed with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on Wednesday the six-party process aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions and "the importance of the abductee issue," Perino said.

Japan wants North Korea to reinvestigate the fate of Japanese citizens abducted in the 1970s and 1980s to help train North Korean spies in language and customs, and is concerned that the United States will remove North Korea from its terrorism list before the issue is resolved.

The White House gave no further details of Bush and Fukuda's discussion on the abductee issue, but State Department spokesman Tom Casey said: "The process is not going to be complete until all of the six parties have the variety of issues that are on the table resolved."

Under an agreement reached in the six-party process -- including Japan, the United States, China, South and North Korea and Russia -- Pyongyang promised to drop all its nuclear programs in exchange for diplomatic and economic benefits.

North Korea had originally promised the nuclear declaration by the end of 2007, and U.S. officials cautioned that they did not know whether Pyongyang would produce it by Thursday.

"I have no reason to believe that they will or will not meet it. So we'll just have to wait and see," Perino said.

(Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria and Paul Eckert; Editing by David Storey and David Wiessler)