We have six nuclear bombs, North Korea warns US

NORTH KOREA has told the US administration it has produced enough plutonium to make six nuclear bombs, it was reported yesterday.

Pyongyang warned last week it would move quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior US officials told the New York Times.

But US intelligence agencies believe the North Korean government may be bluffing to raise the stakes during the current diplomatic stand-off between the two countries.

"It's the mirror image of the Iraq problem," one official told the paper.

"We spent years looking for evidence Iraq was lying when it said it didn't have a nuclear programme. Now North Korea says it's about to go nuclear, and everyone is trying to figure out whether they've finally done it, or if it's the big lie," he said.

Preliminary US atmospheric tests to determine if plutonium was being made at North Korean sites suggested that nuclear work has accelerated, but the results were inconclusive.

More precise information is expected at the end of this week. North Korea boasted in April it was working to convert its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium.

The rods had been held under seal until January when Pyongyang broke a 1994 non-proliferation agreement with the US. US President George W Bush said in May a nuclear-armed North Korea will not be tolerated.

But his administration has resisted using military action against the country's main nuclear reprocessing plant, fearing it would be too risky.

A US State Department spokesman said North Korea had made a variety of claims in the past, some false.

"We've always said we will look at all of the available information, not just what they happen to claim or say at any given moment," he said.

Meanwhile, former US defence secretary William Perry has warned the US and North Korea are drifting to war, perhaps as early as this year.

He said Pyongyang would soon have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests and exporting them to terrorists who could plant them in the US.

"I think we are losing control," he said. "The nuclear programme now under way in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in US cities," he said.

Meanwhile, China showed growing signs of impatience with North Korea yesterday, urging a swift restart of nuclear talks following President Hu Jintao taking the unusual step of sending a personal letter to Kim Jong-Il.

As Deputy Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo returned from delivering the message, the Chinese foreign ministry said Kim had been told talks held on the impasse earlier this year in Beijing must resume as soon as possible.

"Achieving such a goal is of critical importance to the peace, stability and development of the East Asia and Asian region," ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a Tuesday briefing.

Dai's Pyongyang trip comes less than a week after South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun visited China to push North Korea towards agreeing to multilateral talks that would also include South Korea, and likely Japan.

China, North Korea's closest ally, has been trying to initiate a second round of discussions following a first round of trilateral talks among the US, North Korea and China in April.

North Korea insists it speak directly to the US and has turned up the pressure in recent days with reports it has completed reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.

US and South Korean officials say North Korea may have one or two nuclear bombs and believe reprocessing the fuel rods would yield enough plutonium for around six more.