NEW YORK - THE United States has yet to consider steps like stopping fuel oil shipments to North Korea despite signs Pyongyang may rebuild its nuclear programme, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday.

'We just haven't considered what specific steps we might take. We may need to take steps, but that's not the stage at which we are right now,' Dr Rice told Reuters in an interview.

Dr Rice's low-key stance suggested she was still looking for ways to revive a multilateral aid-for-disarmament agreement under which North Korea promised to abandon its nuclear programmes in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits.

The agreement among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States is one of the Bush administration's diplomatic successes, but it appears in danger of unravelling as US President George W. Bush prepares to step down next year.

Having begun disabling its reactor complex at Yongbyon, including blowing up its cooling tower, the North has made moves to restore the facility, including putting back in place equipment it had put in storage.

North Korea has said it would restart Yongbyon because it was angry at Washington for leaving it on the US terrorism blacklist.

In early September, it made minor but initial moves to restart the plant, US officials said.

On Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the North was expelling UN monitors from the Soviet-era nuclear plant and planned to start reactivating it next week.

The North, which conducted a nuclear test in October 2006, is believed to have produced enough plutonium at Yongbyon to make at least eight or nine nuclear weapons.

Energy-starved North Korea has received shipments of heavy fuel oil and other aid as a reward for progress under the nuclear deal. But South Korea has indicated the aid could be terminated because of the North's backtracking.

Still on US list
Washington has made clear it will only remove Pyongyang from its list of state sponsors of terrorism once it has agreed on a mechanism to verify a declaration that it has made about its plutonium-based nuclear programme.

The Washington Post reported on Friday the broader deal may have broken down in part because North Korea thought a US plan to verify Pyongyang's claims about plutonium production would give inspectors too much access to the secretive state.

The US plan would allow investigators to photograph and videotape any suspected nuclear site, remain on site as long as necessary, make repeated visits and collect samples, the newspaper said.

Dr Rice did not comment directly on the newspaper report, but suggested Washington was not scaling back its demands.

'We consider the verification measures that are being proposed to be in line with what needs to be done to actually verify what is on the declaration and ... to answer certain concerns that we have about the North Korean programme in all of its facets,' she said.

In addition to its plutonium-based program at Yongbyon, the United States suspects North Korea has pursued uranium enrichment, which could yield a second path to making nuclear weapons.

US officials have said the North Korean steps to revive Yongbyon coincided with reports that its leader, Kim Jong Il, is ill.

Dr Rice acknowledged the timing but said, 'I don't know if that's coincidence or causality.' -- REUTERS