WASHINGTON — President Bush’s nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea is meeting strong skepticism on Capitol Hill and from the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president, Senator McCain.

As Mr. Bush was explaining his decision in a Rose Garden speech, the McCain campaign released a statement warning that America may be rewarding Pyongyang for empty promises.

“If we are unable to fully verify the declaration submitted today and if I am not satisfied with the verification mechanisms developed, I would not support the easing of sanctions on North Korea,” Mr. McCain said.

The move is a gamble for Mr. Bush. If the lifting of some sanctions induces the Hermit Kingdom to disclose all of its nuclear activities, including its assistance to Syria and suspected assistance to Iran, then the West would gain valuable insights into the global nuclear black market. But if this latest deal is like the one Pyongyang signed with the Clinton administration, suspending some nuclear activities while secretly pursuing bomb-making at Yongbyon, then history will judge that Mr. Bush, too, was conned.

Mr. Bush said he would notify Congress that within 45 days he would remove North Korea from the list of designated state sponsors of terrorism and also remove sanctions associated with the Trading With the Enemy Act. He said, though, that North Korea would remain “one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world.”

“We remain deeply concerned about North Korea’s human rights abuses, uranium enrichment activities, nuclear testing and proliferation, ballistic missile programs, and the threat it continues to pose to South Korea and its neighbors,” Mr. Bush said.

The Republican reaction on Capitol Hill was one of disbelief. The ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, said in a statement, “The Administration is rushing to reward North Korea by lifting the terrorism designation and removing a number of sanctions related to this designation. We have yet to determine if the declaration is complete and verifiable but are relinquishing one of the most valuable instruments of leverage available to the U.S.”

The ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, said, “Serious questions remain unanswered about North Korea’s involvement with the destroyed Syrian nuclear reactor and its commitment to fully disclose and halt its nuclear program. Instead of greeting North Korea’s declaration with deserved skepticism, the administration seems all too willing to ignore North Korea’s long-established history of nuclear mendacity.”

The North Koreans yesterday submitted to Chinese envoys a 60-page declaration of its current nuclear weapons and power programs. The regime also promised to demolish a vacant cooling tower at its previously undisclosed Yongbyon facility. Yongbyon was the site of clandestine nuclear plutonium processing, in violation of the spirit if not the letter of the joint framework agreement the regime signed in 1994.

“Obviously, the weapons and all the programs are going to have to be dealt with and dismantled if we are to have denuclearization, and it’s going to have to be done verifiably,” Secretary of State Rice said. “If we can verifiably determine the amount of plutonium that has been made, we then have an upper hand in understanding what may have happened in terms of weaponization.”

Secretary Rice said that America possessed the ability to verify the disarmament of the North Koreans.

A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who has worked to create a political coalition of Korean American groups, human rights activists, and churches to ameliorate the suffering of North Korea’s population, Michael Horowitz, was critical of the deal.

“Subsidizing and legitimizing the North Korean regime in exchange for nuclear disclosures or even limited nuclear disarmament will substantially increase the risk of war on the Korean peninsula,” he said. “Giving Kim Jong Il money for his weapons today will mean more weapons, not fewer weapons, tomorrow. Even if he completely denuclearizes, I regard it as a certainty that the world will be confronted with one of the world’s largest stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and missiles capable of delivering them, within two years of the date of any nuclear agreement.”

In the last months of his term in office, President Clinton tried to create an opening with North Korea, which fought American troops to a standstill in the Korean War, whose legacy has been the divided peninsula today. The latest State Department report on global terrorism finds that North Korea has not engaged in terror since 1987, though it still hosts members of the Japanese Red Army and has yet to disclose the whereabouts of Japanese citizens the regime abducted in the 1980s.

The forthcoming demolition of a nuclear cooling tower this weekend is little more than the destruction of an empty shell.