Korean claims spark nuclear weapon fears

North Korea has told the US administration that it has produced enough plutonium to make six nuclear bombs, it was reported today.

Pyongyang warned last week that it would move quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American 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.”

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 that 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 that 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 that 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 that the US and North Korea are drifting towards war, perhaps as early as this year.

He told the Washington Post that 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 American cities.”