Fears over North Korea nuke plans

RENEWING fears of a nuclear crisis in the region, North Korea yesterday said it will immediately reactivate a frozen nuclear programme the United States suspects was being used to develop weapons.

A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said his country would revive an old, Soviet-designed nuclear reactor and resume construction of other nuclear facilities to supply desperately needed power.

The programme was suspended under a 1994 deal with the US, averting a possible war on the Korean Peninsula. Experts say North Korea could quickly extract enough plutonium from its old facilities to make several nuclear weapons.

But the official said North Korea was obliged to revive the programme because of the US-led decision last month to suspend annual oil shipments of 500,000 tons to the North.

The suspension of the shipments a key provision of the 1994 deal was designed to pressure North Korea to give up a more recent nuclear programme based on uranium enrichment.

The US says the uranium-based programme violated a nuclear arms control clause in the 1994 Agreed Framework.

"The prevailing situation compelled the (North Korean) government to lift its measure for nuclear freeze...and immediately resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity," KCNA, the North's state-run news agency, quoted the Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

"Our country faced an immediate problem in electricity generation because the United States has virtually abandoned its obligations."

"Our principled stand is that the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula should be resolved peacefully," the spokesman said.

"It is totally up to the United States whether we will freeze our nuclear facilities again."

Although the spokesman left open the possibility of dialogue to solve the stand-off, the prospect that North

Korea might reactivate its plutonium-based nuclear programme had long been feared by US and South Korean officials.

US officials say North Korea told them in October it had a secret programme to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons.

US President George Bush's government has vowed to try to solve the problem through diplomacy.