North Korea stepping up nuclear plan, US warns

As America prepared to resume spy flights off North Korea yesterday, a senior US official warned that the secretive state could have not one, but two separate methods in place within months for the production of nuclear weapons.

The West has long known that reactivation of the experimental reactor at Yongbyon for the reprocessing of spent fuel rods is all that stands between President Kim Jong Il and plutonium-based weapons.

But James Kelly, the Assistant Secretary of State, told Congress in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the parallel enriched uranium programme – whose disclosure last October precipitated the latest crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions – "was probably only months, not years, behind the plutonium programme".

At the same time, tensions were further heightened by a Japanese newspaper report that the North, which has already twice tested short-range missiles in the past month, is about to testfire a medium-range Rodong ballistic missile.

The separate developments all fit the North's strategy of using America's preoccupation with Iraq to raise the stakes in its long campaign to secure direct bilateral negotiations with Washington over its nuclear programmes, with the ultimate goal of a pact of non-aggression. North Korea's state-run Central Radio said recently: "We seek peace, but we will not beg for peace like a slave in the face of demands to disarm, fearing a war."

Mr Kelly reiterated Washington's stance that to engage the North now would simply be to reward bad behaviour. America, he insisted, would not begin serious talks until Pyongyang committed to eliminating its military nuclear programme, halted weapons proliferation and improved its human rights performance.

He added that "there is not the slightest sign" the North would do so. Indeed, General Leon LaPorte, commander of the 37,000 US troops stationed close to South Korea's border with the North, said he expected further provocations, more missile tests and new moves on the nuclear front.

One of the only cheerful notes from Mr Kelly and General Laporte was that they did not expect the North to go as far as launching a war against the South, whose capital, Seoul, is 35 miles from the border where one million North Korean troops are massed. The Pentagon indicated yesterday that it was preparing to resume reconnaissance flights off North Korea's coast, after its fighter jets intercepted an American aircraft equipped to monitor missile tests.

Whether America planned to use fighter jets to escort the reconnaissance flights was not immediately clear, but officials said this week that was highly unlikely. Washington has always claimed the right to conduct aerial surveillance in international airspace without armed escorts.

The confrontation started in earnest last October, when Mr Kelly was told on a visit to Pyongyang that the regime had been pursuing a clandestine enriched uranium programme for several years, and that it was pulling out of a 1994 agreement with America.

Washington responded by suspending fuel shipments. In retaliation the North pulled out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, expelled United Nations weapons inspectors and may now reactivate the Yongbyon reactor. If so, America says, North Korea could be producing enough plutonium for one nuclear device a month.