US believes North Korea plans nuclear bomb test: report

AFP | April 23 2005

The United States believes North Korea is planning to test a nuclear weapon and has asked China to intervene to block the test, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday on its website from South Korea.

In an emergency communication sent yesterday, Washington warned Beijing that Pyongyang was possibly planning a test nuclear explosion, an unidentified US official told the Journal.

The report comes after Pyongyang declared in February that it had nuclear weapons for self-defense.

The Journal reproted that the US told China it "believes the North Korean nuclear program is advanced enough that a test could come with little or no warning".

"It's clear the North Koreans want the world to think that they are moving quickly and rapidly toward a nuclear test," the official told the Journal.

The official said that US spy satellites have detected increased activities at North Korean sites where underground nuclear tests could be carried out.

However, the official told the newspaper that the true intent of those activities was difficult to ascertain.

Another official told the Journal that similar warnings were being sent to South Korea and Japan.

According to reports earlier this week, North Korea recently shut down its only functioning nuclear reactor and told a visiting US specialist that it planned to unload spent nuclear fuel from the plant and reprocess it into weapons-grade plutonium.

Two years ago, North Korea said it reprocessed enough spent fuel from the reactor to produce plutonium for six to eight atom bombs.

US intelligence believes the country could already possess one or two crude nuclear bombs based on fuel reprocessed in previous decades.

Talks between the Pyongyang regime and the US, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear arms ambitions stalled last year after three inconclusive rounds.