North Korea edging closer to nuclear tests

North Korea has taken "preparatory steps" toward testing a nuclear weapon, a Bush administration official said Wednesday. The Asian nation's communist government, meanwhile, said it has finished removing spent fuel rods from its nuclear reactor, a key step toward making more bomb-grade plutonium.
The developments exacerbate an already tense standoff between the United States and North Korea. The news comes as North Korea, long believed to have enough material for up to eight atomic bombs, approaches the nuclear threshold.

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer told Japanese officials in a meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday about North Korea's test preparations, and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher in Washington confirmed Schieffer's comments. Boucher also cautioned against reading too much into them.

North Korea's foreign ministry said Wednesday that the removal of 8,000 fuel rods from a five-megawatt nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, about 60 miles north of Pyongyang, was aimed at helping North Korea "bolster its nuclear arsenal."

Two U.S. intelligence officials with access to classified information on North Korea cautioned that the evidence of an impending test in the northeastern province of Kilju is highly ambiguous. It's based mainly on satellite photos of tunneling activity that could indicate burying a nuclear device for an underground blast, they said. The officials asked to remain anonymous because the information they outlined is classified.

North Korea's military does extensive tunneling to hide sensitive equipment or provide shelter from air attack, the officials said, and the tunneling could also stem from mining operations.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview Tuesday that his analysis of the evidence has convinced him North Korea is ready for a test that only awaits North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's approval.

"I wouldn't call it speculation," Roberts said. "I don't think there's any question that North Korea is determined to increase its activity with nuclear weaponry."

Removal of the fuel rods, weighing a total of 50 tons, is a first step toward "reprocessing" the spent nuclear fuel to extract bomb-grade plutonium, according to David Albright, a nuclear weapons expert and director of the Institute for Science and International Security. The rods will have to sit in a cooling pond for three to six months, and the chemical process of extracting the plutonium — enough for three to five weapons — would take an additional six months.

A North Korean test would likely use plutonium extracted from fuel rods in an earlier round of reprocessing over the last three years, Albright said. A test would increase tension on the peninsula but would also provide U.S. intelligence with some valuable information.

In the event of a test, seismic sensors in the region should be able to tell U.S. intelligence the size of the bomb, Albright said. The U.S. military has aircraft with sensing equipment that patrol the waters off North Korea trying to pick airborne traces that might have leaked from an underground test site.

But Anthony Cordesman of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies said testing a nuclear weapon won't prove that North Korea has a device small enough to deliver on a missile or from an aircraft