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But US officials suggested that the North Korean statement may have been mistranslated.
North Korea's official KCNA news agency issued a statement in English saying that Pyongyang was "successfully reprocessing" more than 8,000 spent fuel rods.
Reprocessing the fuel rods would be the most provocative step North Korea has taken since the nuclear dispute flared in October, when Washington said Pyongyang admitted to a covert programme to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
US officials said this could be enough to produce six to eight nuclear weapons and it would flout repeated US warnings to Pyongyang against reprocessing the spent fuel rods.
Pyongyang's statement said, "As we have already declared, we are successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase, as we sent interim information to the US and other countries concerned early in March after resuming our nuclear activities from December last year."
A new translation produced by the US government's Foreign Broadcast Information Service from a Korean-language report on Pyongyang's Korean Central Broadcasting Station suggested North Korea was on the verge of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods rather than having had already done so.
According to this version, which was released by the State Department, US analysts rendered the statement as: "We are successfully completing the final phase to the point of the reprocessing operation for some 8,000 spent fuel rods."
"Our experts looked at the Korean version and said, this is a better way to translate this," said an unnamed US official.
The statements and the conflicting translations threw into confusion what were expected to be the first formal talks with North Korea in the nuclear crisis: a meeting of US, China and North Korea expected to start on Wednesday.
US officials sent conflicting signals on whether they would attend the three-way talks in Beijing, with some saying it could be cancelled and others suggesting that it would go ahead.
Meanwhile Japan and South Korea said they had no information to back up the North's original statement, which could fit into a past Pyongyang pattern of raising the stakes ahead of major talks as an attention-grabbing negotiating tactic.
North Korea's announcement of its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has escalated the dispute over the country's nuclear program and has caused alarm throughout Asia.
After North Korea's surprising confession in October 2002 of having a secret nuclear-arms program, U.S., South Korea, and Japan have been grappling with questions of what to do next. South Korea has now summoned an emergency meeting of its National Security Council. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he would demand that North Korea reverse the decision and potentially introduce economic sanctions.
According to CNN, despite its pullout from the NPT, North Korea pledged to limit its nuclear activities to "peaceful purposes." However, it is believed that North Korea could produce enough plutonium for five or six nuclear bombs by May.
In December, Pyongyang announced that it had no choice but to reactivate its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon because the U.S. was planning a pre-emptive strike. Most recently, North Korea has called for direct talks with Washington and a non-aggression pact after expelling UN inspectors monitoring the Yongbyon nuclear complex. But the U.S. has consistently rejected direct talks with North Korea until it dismantles its nuclear facilities.
South Korean President-elect, Roh Moo-hyun, (see special report on South Korean Election) has suggested that South mediate to resolve the crisis. According to the BBC, Lim Chae-jung, a spokesman for Mr. Roh, said that "President-elect Roh considers the nuclear issue as a matter of life and death for all the Korean people and approaches it very cautiously."
U.S. officials are worried that a confrontation with the isolated rogue nation could destabilize Asia as the Bush administration pursues plans to disarm Iraq. But the U.S. is pushing for diplomatic and economic pressure, not threats of military action, to try to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear efforts.
Copyright 2003 Dhamaka News
© 2003, GENERATOR 21.
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