The State Department said its top envoy on the nuclear issue, Christopher Hill, was expected to hold talks with officials from Japan, South Korea, China and Russia to chart the next steps.

Department spokesman Tom Casey confirmed that North Korea, to no one's surprise, had failed to deliver a declaration detailing its atomic programs by the December 31 deadline, which was set out under a six-nation agreement.

"There has been no last-minute change," he told reporters. "It's unfortunate but we are going to keep on working on this."

North Korea now risks losing out on diplomatic and economic incentives promised in return for a full nuclear declaration, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

"This is an action-for-action process," he told reporters in Texas, where US President George W. Bush was to ring in 2008 on his ranch.

"In order to have action on one side, we have to have action on the other side as well," Stanzel said.

"We think it's possible for the North Koreans to provide a full and complete declaration. We hope that they will do that as soon as possible," he said.

However, both the White House and State Department were unwilling to talk of new deadlines after North Korea flouted the year-end requirement.

"I'm not going to put a timeline on it," Stanzel said.

Under the six-nation pact, North Korea was required to disable its main nuclear plants by December 31 and declare all its nuclear programs and weaponry.

In exchange, the other parties were to club together in financial and economic assistance to the impoverished and isolated state, including one million tons of fuel oil or equivalent energy aid.

"I expect there will be some consultations on this over the next few days among the parties to see how we want to proceed from here," Casey said.

"We're still committed to getting a declaration, and we want that declaration to be full and complete."

Japan and South Korea also expressed regret at the delay, which came amid a report that the communist state has slowed down the disabling work it began in November.

"We've always known all along that each step in this process was going to be more and more difficult," Casey said.

"The declaration is really critical to ensuring not only that this phase is completed, but that we be able to move forward successfully on the next and most important phase," he said, referring to a fully denuclearized North Korea.

Removal of fuel rods at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex has been slowed by US insistence that the process fully meet international safety requirements.

But Casey said the North Koreans themselves were to blame for other delays, after Japan's Kyodo News said Pyongyang had told the US it was reducing the shifts of workers carrying out the disablement operation.

In any case, the North Korean declaration is widely seen as a political step which requires a strategic decision by the Kim Jong-Il regime on how much it wants to reveal about its past nuclear activity.

One problem with the declaration is reaching agreement on how much bomb-making plutonium was produced at Yongbyon in the past.

The North used some of this to stage its first atomic weapons test in October 2006, a shock event that lent greater urgency to the six-party process.

"This can't be a situation where they pretend to give us a full declaration and we pretend to believe them," Casey said.

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