Washington, D.C. ? North Korea handed detailed nuclear weapons records to the United States on Thursday, an important peek into the isolated regime’s bombmaking past but not enough to answer criticism that the Bush administration is grasping for a disarmament deal at any cost.

The technical logs from North Korea’s shuttered plutonium reactor would give outside experts a yardstick to measure whether the North is telling the truth about a bomb program that the poor nation has agreed to trade away for economic and political rewards.

“Our top three priorities are going to be verification, verification, verification,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.