The "new effort" will verify the long-delayed declaration by Pyongyang under a six-nation aid-for-denuclearization deal, the State Department said.

"That's something that will be handled in the verification subgroup" of the six-party talks, department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters when asked on prospective "verification methods" for North Korea's nuclear program under the bid to end Pyongyang's atomic weapons drive.

The verification mechanism is expected to be set up under the "denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" working group, one of five groups set up under a February 2007 agreement among the six parties.

"It's a new effort. It's something that has been integrated into the talks, and I guess as a bureacratic grouping then organized within the context of those talks," McCormack said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had discussed the establishment of the verification subgroup with leaders of China and well as other countries, a State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The announcement of the verification measure Wednesday came amid criticism of a reported prospective deal reached earlier this month between US and North Korean envoys for the hardline communist state to declare its nuclear program.

Under the deal, North Korea would provide a list of its plutonium stockpile and merely "acknowledge" concerns listed by the United States about its suspected uranium enrichment and nuclear proliferation activities, reports have said.

Washington had earlier called for a full accounting of an alleged North Korean secret uranium enrichment program and suspected proliferation of nuclear technology and material to Syria, charges denied by Pyongyang.

Although the latest deal may have broken the months-old deadlock, it has caused a great deal of scepticism among experts.

"After months of demanding that the North live up to its promise to provide a 'complete declaration of its nuclear programs,' the US is now backtracking," the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial Wednesday headlined "Six-party giveaway."

John Bolton, a former State Department non-proliferation chief, said the deal "rests on trust and not verification" and warned that Pyongyang's "escape from accountability could break down international counter-proliferation efforts."

But Rice said last week that any declaration from North Korea had to be "verified and it has to be verifiable.

"And we have to make certain that we have means to assess what the North Koreans tell us, and we have to have means to verify what the North Koreans tell us," she said.

North Korea had missed a December 31, 2007 deadline for providing a full declaration of its nuclear program and proliferation activities, delaying implementation of its denuclearization drive that Washington wants completed before President George W. Bush leaves office in January 2009.

After testing a nuclear bomb in October 2006, Pyongyang closed its key atomic plant and is now on the verge of disabling it under the six-party deal.

If North Korea completes providing the nuclear declaration, the parties could move to implement the final phase of dismantling its nuclear program and materials.

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