North Korea Warns US: We Can Produce Six Atom Bombs

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

(18:36)

By Rupert Cornwell

Independent Writer

“The nuclear programme now under way in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities.”

WASHINGTON -- Independent
The crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons programme deepened yesterday as the North claimed it had made enough plutonium for six atomic bombs, and a former US Defence Secretary warned that the two countries could be at war by the end of the year.

The latest claim from Pyongyang was communicated to the Bush administration last week, three months after North Korea said it was beginning to reprocess 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that were under United Nations seal until the UN inspectors were ejected from the country at the end of 2002.

US intelligence agencies are now trying to determine whether the boast is true or merely another bluff by the reclusive Stalinist regime.

Either way, the declaration has pushed the US President a step nearer deciding whether to accede to North Korea's demand for direct negotiations - and thus drop his previous insistence that he would never bow to "nuclear blackmail" - or to accelerate plans for a military strike against the North's nuclear installations.

That spectre was raised yesterday by William Perry, Defence Secretary under President Clinton, when he told The Washington Post that the Bush administration was "losing control" of the situation.

Mr Perry is a specialist on Korea who helped prepare the military action which Mr Clinton came close to launching against Yongbyon and other key North Korean sites in 1994. He now fears that the North is not only close to a nuclear test to show the world it is a nuclear power, but also that it could sell a weapon to a terrorist group for use against the US.
(More: Independent.co.uk)
2003 © Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

Dan