Washington wants North Korea to adopt verification measures aimed at confirming that a declaration it provided on its nuclear program to a six-nation forum was "whole and complete and verifiable," officials said.

They made the statement as top US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill extended his stay by another day to Friday in Pyongyang where he was apparently attempting to save the crumbling nuclear disarmament deal.

Hill will return Friday to South Korea, before flying to China, which chairs six party talks involving also the United States, the two Koreas, Russia and Japan aimed at ending the North's nuclear program, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

"What the other five members are looking for from North Korea is agreement on a verification protocol and that is an irreducible component of the six-party process moving forward," he told reporters.

North Korea has accused Washington of violating its dignity by seeking Iraq-style "house searches" as part of a rigid verification protocol.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was not going to compromise on the verification process for any "geopolitical" reasons, officials said.

"From her point of view, they meet the criteria or they don't and there is nothing inevitable about this process," said a senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"She is not going to shortchange our ability to stand up and say, 'Yes, we have verified this declaration as full and complete as best as we can ascertain in the interests of some geopolitical expedience.

"She is not going to do that."

The United States says the North must first agree to procedures for outside verification of its nuclear declaration before it could remove the hardline communist state from a US terrorism blacklist.

Pyongyang however accused Washington of breaching the six-nation deal by failing to remove it from a terrorism blacklist first.

The North has warned it would begin work to restart its key nuclear reactor and barred UN atomic inspectors from the complex.

The dispute is threatening to undo a February 2007 six-nation deal which led the North to shut down its plutonium-producing plants.

US officials said that Hill was expected to propose that North Korea first give China a plan that includes sampling, access to key sites and other verification provisions sought by the United States.

President George W. Bush would then provisionally remove the North from the terrorism list, after which China would announce North Korea's acceptance of the verification plan.

This would allow Pyongyang to assert that the delisting occurred before the verification plan was in place.

related report
US envoy seeking to save nuke deal extends stay in NKorea
US negotiator Christopher Hill has extended his stay in North Korea where he is trying to save a crumbling nuclear disarmament deal, US and South Korean officials said Thursday.

It was unclear whether the extension indicated Hill was making progress in trying to dissuade the hardline communist state from restarting the nuclear programme it shut down 14 months ago.

A US embassy spokesman said the assistant secretary of state would not be returning Thursday afternoon as expected, but had no information on when he would come back.

A South Korean foreign ministry official involved in six-nation nuclear negotiations also said Hill's delegation would not cross the border Thursday. "But we do not know exactly when they will return," he told AFP.

US officials in Washington earlier confirmed media reports that Hill would offer a face-saving compromise in his attempt to rescue the 2007 agreement which led the North to shut down its plutonium-producing plants.

Hill drove across the heavily fortified inter-Korean border at Panmunjom Wednesday en route to Pyongyang and talks with his counterpart Kim Kye-Gwan. He was to hold more talks Thursday, the US State Department said.

Despite the nuclear tensions, South and North Korea held their own talks Thursday -- their first official contact in eight months. But the military meeting at Panmunjom ended earlier than scheduled and with little progress.

The North threatened to evict all South Korean staff from a joint industrial estate at Kaesong unless Seoul stops civic groups spreading cross-border propaganda.

The South meanwhile demanded a halt to vitriolic attacks on its president, Lee Myung-Bak.

The six-party deal was reached in February 2007, just four months after the North's first nuclear test.

Pyongyang shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex in July last year and began disabling it in November. In June it handed over a declaration of nuclear activities to talks host China.

Now the North is angry that the US failed to respond by removing it from a terrorism blacklist, as required under the accord. It says it will soon begin work to restart a plutonium reprocessing plant which could produce more bomb-making material from spent fuel rods.

Before delisting occurs, the US demands that the North accept an agreement on procedures to verify its declaration.

The North says verification is not part of this stage of the agreement. It accuses Washington of violating its dignity by seeking Iraq-style "house searches" for atomic material.

China, the North's sole major ally, is the focus of a possible face-saving compromise, US officials said Wednesday.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said only that Beijing could play the "special role" it has in the past "as a repository for documents and information."

A senior US official said the deal could see Washington remove Pyongyang from the blacklist if it submits written acceptance of the verification plan to China.

The official said the original idea was for the North to submit it to all five partners -- South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US.

The Washington Post last week reported that under the proposal, the US would provisionally remove the North from the blacklist and China would then announce North Korea's acceptance of the verification plan.

This would allow the North to claim that the US acted first.

However, McCormack denied that Hill was carrying proposed changes to the actual verification plan.

The US-inspired protocol reportedly calls for access to undeclared suspected nuclear facilities and for inspectors to take samples of material.

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