Discussions at a Chinese government compound in western Beijing focused on the exact wording of a verification protocol, based on a draft which host China handed out Tuesday to participants in the six-nation talks.

"It was a tough and long day today ... we did not make any progress today, not at all, not with me," US chief negotiator Christopher Hill said at the end of the third day of talks.

"We had some real difficulty in consensus on moving forwards... in terms of coming up with the verification agreement, we don't seem to be narrowing differences."

The dispute over verification is the latest snag in a drawn-out effort to undo the nuclear programme of the secretive North Korean regime, which tested an atomic weapon for the first time in October 2006.

The painstaking drafting process follows North Korea's claim in October that it had never agreed to the sampling of atomic material as a viable verification procedure, which the US and others say is a crucial method.

Host China would announce later if the talks were to continue on into a fourth day, Hill said, following more than three hours of discussion Wednesday. Japan's chief envoy Akitaka Saiki, however, said the talks would continue Thursday.

The apparent breakdown came as North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper accused the United States of using the six party talks as a smokescreen to launch a pre-emptive strike on the nation.

"The US bellicose forces are escalating their moves for preemptive attack on the DPRK (North Korea) behind the scene of the six-party talks," the paper said.

"This is a reckless military action going against the trend of the present situation and little short of planting a time-bomb in the way of the six-party talks."

The six-party effort to resolve the North Korean nuclear impasse is one of the most intractable diplomatic issues that the George W. Bush administration will pass on to president-elect Barack Obama.

The nations appeared to make a breakthrough last year when Pyongyang agreed to disable facilities at its plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear complex and reveal its atomic activities.

The deal -- which also called for the delivery of a million tonnes of fuel oil or energy aid of equivalent value to the North -- has hit multiple snags.

But in October, following an apparent agreement on verification procedures, the United States said it would drop the North from a terrorism blacklist, and Pyongyang reversed plans to restart its plutonium-producing nuclear plants.

The talks, originally launched in 2003, group North and South Korea with China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Japan's Saiki said there were "many places" in the draft where improvements could be made, but negotiators could not agree on how to make them, according to the Kyodo news agency.

"Looking at today's discussions, I had the impression that differences in positions will not be narrowed easily," Saiki was quoted as saying.

South Korea's envoy Kim Sook was similarly downbeat on the talks' prospects of ending with a breakthrough.

"Substantive progress was not made as differences could not be narrowed over the Chinese-proposed verification protocol," Kim said after talks concluded.

"It was clarified that there should be scientific procedures such as sampling, but North Korea did not accept this."

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