- North Korea has raised the stakes dramatically in its
confrontation with the United States by privately threatening to conduct
its first underground nuclear test, it emerged yesterday.
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- A senior official of the hardline Communist regime warned
in New York that his country would take counter-measures, "for example,
a nuclear test", if the US did not ease pressure on his isolated country.
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- The warning, by Han Sung Ryol, North Korea's deputy ambassador
to the United Nations, was delivered to an American official earlier this
month, according to reports circulating in Tokyo yesterday.
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- The test would be conducted inside a tunnel dug into
a mountain in the run-up to September 9, the anniversary of the the republic's
foundation, the respected Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported.
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- Meanwhile North Korea is set to announce that it has
become the world's ninth nuclear power, should Washington not offer a non-aggression
guarantee in return for abandoning its nuclear programme, say officials
in Tokyo close to the Pyongyang regime.
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- Senior American officials, who are reluctant to rule
out future military action, fear that the warning shows that the rogue
state's relations with the United States are out of control.
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- William Perry, a former secretary of defence under President
Clinton, warned that Pyongyang may have acquired six to eight nuclear weapons
by the end of the year, allowing the regime to target Japan, South Korea
and even Hawaii in the United States.
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- "I think we are losing control of the situation,"
he said. "The nuclear programme underway in North Korea poses an imminent
danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities."
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- In an effort to block any export of weapons from North
Korea, the United States has assembled a group of 10 other nations, including
Britain, which have agreed to intercept suspicious North Korean shipping.
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- The interception programme is "ready to rock and
roll right now", said one State Department official. "All we
need is actionable intelligence." Pyongyang has stated that any attempt
to impose sanctions or a blockade would be treated as a "declaration
of war".
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- The deteriorating situation has fuelled growing fears
of an arms race in south-east Asia, with Russia and Japan watching the
stand-off between North Korea and the US with growing trepidation.
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- Japan has already begun to re-think its post-war pacifist
stance while Russia's deputy foreign minister, Alexander Losyukov, said
that Moscow had begun to take steps to defend itself from the possible
use of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.
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- Pravda reported that "testing of the civil defence
resources has already started in the districts bordering North Korea".
The head of Moscow's Institute of Strategic Studies, Alexander Konovalov,
said that confirmation of a North Korean nuclear arsenal would "have
critical consequences worldwide".
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- Despite the moves to blockade shipping, the Bush administration
appears increasingly divided over how to deal with the crisis. State Department
officials indicated last week that a written security guarantee to North
Korea might be possible, but the suggestion was immediately dismissed by
the White House. "We've made it clear that we will not give in to
blackmail," said Scott McLellan, the White House spokesman.
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- In the Pentagon, meanwhile, hawks are privately discussing
the possibility of launching a "surgical strike" similar to the
Israeli raid carried out on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. A State Department
official told The Telegraph: "More than a few people are worried about
where we might end up six months down the road. This impasse is not going
to be the status quo for ever."
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- Under its eccentric dictator Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang has
never officially claimed membership of the "nuclear club", though
it recognised last October that it was pursuing a secret nuclear weapons
programme. The eight countries acknowledged to possess nuclear weapons
are the US, Britain, Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India and Israel.
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- In 2001, President Bush named North Korea as the third
member of an "axis of evil" alongside Iran and Iraq. Since last
October, North Korea has expelled international inspectors, rebuilt a derelict
nuclear facility and reprocessed up to 800 spent fuel rods in order to
prepare plutonium for nuclear bombs. The Central Intelligence Agency has
suspected for some time that the regime already has at least one nuclear
weapon.
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- The White House is counting on multilateral negotiations
involving China, South Korea and Japan to defuse the situation.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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07/27/wkor27.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/07/27/ixnewstop.html
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