A United States envoy confirmed on Wednesday that North Korea has begun preparations for a nuclear test as the Stalinist state claimed it has taken a key step towards the manufacture of more atomic bombs.
North Korea is believed to have as many as eight nuclear weapons, according to some estimates, but has not tested one so far.
US ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer, confirming media speculation from the US, said that could soon change.
”I believe they have taken some preparatory steps,” the newly appointed envoy was quoted as saying in Tokyo at a meeting with a Japanese ruling coalition leader.
Schieffer is the first US official to go on record as saying that a nuclear test could be in the works, after unnamed officials were quoted in The New York Times last week.
According to satellite and other intelligence data, those officials believe Pyongyang is building a reviewing stand and filling in a tunnel, clear pointers to a potential underground nuclear test.
Schieffer believes there is a ”high possibility” of a nuclear test, according to a Japanese official.
South Korean officials have been sceptical about the reports that North Korea is preparing a test at Kilju, in north-eastern North Korea, where satellite images show the suspected tunnel.
US and South Korean intelligence agencies have been watching the tunnel since the late 1990s, and officials in Seoul said as recently as Wednesday that they neither had detected signs nor received intelligence from the US that would indicate test preparations.
In a separate development on Wednesday, North Korea said that it has completed unloading 8 000 spent fuel rods from its nuclear reactor, a step that will allow it to reprocess enough plutonium for about half a dozen bombs.
North Korea shut down the reactor last month, allowing it to unload the spent fuel and remove it for reprocessing.
”The relevant field of the DPRK [North Korea] has successfully finished the unloading of 8 000 spent fuel rods from the 5MW [megawatt] pilot nuclear plant in the shortest period recently,” a foreign ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The spokesperson added that North Korea ”keeps taking necessary measures to bolster its nuclear arsenal for the defensive purpose of coping with the prevailing situation, with a main emphasis on developing the self-reliant nuclear power industry”.
The five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, 90km north of the capital, Pyongyang, was frozen under a 1994 deal with the US that collapsed in 2002 following US allegations that Pyongyang was still pursuing nuclear weapons.
The US government believes North Korea already had enough plutonium for one or two crude nuclear devices before the deal collapsed.
Then North Korea claimed in late 2003 that it had reprocessed a first batch of 8 000 spent fuel rods from the 5MW reactor that would allow it to produce about six more bombs.
If North Korea reprocesses a second batch of spent fuel it claims to have unloaded, it could double that number of bombs, according to experts.
The spokesperson said North Korea had also resumed construction on its 50MW and 200MW nuclear plants in December 2002, blaming Washington for the collapse of the 1994 accord.
The developments further clouded prospects for the resumption of talks to end the nuclear stand-off any time soon.
Six-party talks bringing together the two Koreas, Russia, China, Japan and the US on the North’s nuclear programmes have been in limbo since a third round of discussions last June. North Korea boycotted a fourth round scheduled for September. — Sapa-AFP