Two weeks ago, North Korea's secretive regime turned over to the United States a treasure trove of nearly 19,000 pages of documents. North Korea said it is the complete operating record of its 5 megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and a nearby reprocessing plant designed to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel rods for making nuclear weapons.

The records are crucial to the Bush administration's high-priority effort to get North Korea to disarm:   they are expected to show how much  plutonium it was able to create (and therefore how many bombs it might be able to construct).

The documents are being translated and analyzed by an inter-agency team including specialists from the U.S. intelligence community, State Department and Energy Department. Government officials have been ordered not to discuss the findings of that analysis in any detail.

We're told by one U.S. official that the package of documents "is what it's supposed to be." The official said "evidently there's nothing we've found in those documents that would preclude moving forward along the diplomacy lines." (Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill is due to meet Wednesday in Beijing with his North Korean counterpart to discuss the next stage in the negotiations).

No word yet on what the documents say about North Korea's plutonium production. North Korea says the Yongbyon reactor produced 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of plutonium; U.S. intelligence estimates are slightly higher. It takes about seven kilograms of plutonium to build a bomb.

An unclassified summary of what the North Korean documents contain is expected in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.