North Korea may be ahead of game

Washington: North Korea has constructed a plant to manufacture a gas needed for uranium enrichment, according to a previously unpublicised account by the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb programme, a development that indicates Pyongyang opened a second way to build nuclear weapons as early as the 1990s.

Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan also said that North Korea may have been enriching uranium on a small scale by 2002, with "maybe 3,000 or even more" centrifuges, and that Pakistan helped the country with vital machinery, drawings and technical advice for at least six years.

Khan's account could not be independently corroborated. But one US intelligence official and a US diplomat said his information adds to their suspicions that North Korea has long pursued the enrichment of uranium in addition to making plutonium for bombs.

Khan's account of the pilot plant is included in a narrative that depicts relations between the two countries' scientists as close for nearly a decade. Khan says that during a visit to North Korea in 1999, he toured a mountain tunnel. There his hosts showed him boxes containing components of three finished nuclear warheads, which he was told could be assembled for use within an hour.

"While they explained the construction [design of their bombs], they quietly showed me the six boxes" containing split cores for the warheads, as well as "64 ignitors/detonators per bomb packed in six separate boxes," Khan said.

His visit occurred seven years before the country's first detonation, prompting US officials to say that Khan's account, if correct, suggests North Korea's achievements were more advanced than previously known, and that the country may have more sophisticated weapons than estimated.

Tacit agreement

Since some of Khan's actions were exposed in 2003 and 2004, top Pakistani officials have called him a ‘rogue proliferator'. Khan said, however, there was a tacit agreement between the two governments that his laboratory "would advise and guide them with the centrifuge programme and that the North Koreans would help Pakistan in fitting the nuclear warhead into the Ghauri missile" his country's name for its version of the Nodong missiles that Pakistan bought from North Korea.

Pakistani officials in Washington dismissed Khan's assertions as baseless, without responding to questions about Kidwai's role. "Pakistan, as a nuclear weapons state, has always acted with full responsibility and never engaged itself in any activity in violation of the non-proliferation norms," the embassy said.

Song Ryol Han, the North Korean ambassador to the UN, denied that his country had a uranium programme before last spring or that it ever discussed the issue "with Dr Khan in Pakistan".