North Korea ‘to test nuke by end of year’

NORTH KOREA has enough plutonium to make six to 10 nuclear weapons and could test such a weapon by the end of the year, a former US negotiator with the Stalinist state said in an interview published yesterday.

“To the best of my knowledge, based on very well-informed Washington sources, North Korea’s nuclear program is moving ahead very quickly,” Kenneth Quinones was quoted as saying by the Daily Yomiuri.

“Basically, this means North Korea’s reprocessing (of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel) is almost finished, or has finished.

This means North Korea now has enough plutonium to make six to 10 nuclear weapons,” he said.

“The more I talked to my friends, the more I realised that it is possible for North Korea to have a nuclear weapon by December. It is possible they’ll have a test by December."

As a US state department official, Mr Quinones was involved in US talks with North Korea that led to a 1994 agreement that froze its nuclear program in exchange for light-water reactors for power generation and heavy fuel aid.

Pyongyang has however declared the agreement void amid a dispute with Washington about its nuclear ambitions.

The dispute arose last October when the United States said North Korea had admitted to running a nuclear weapons program based on highly enriched uranium. Washington then cut off fuel aid to the energy-starved regime.

North Korea later unsealed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods from an old graphite-moderate reactor, which produces weapons-grade plutonium as a by-product.

Last month communist North Korea declared publicly for the first timethat it was seeking nuclear weapons.

Reports in Japan have said North Korea might have acquired technology to reduce the size of nuclear weapons so they can be mounted on ballistic missiles.