NORTH KOREA: North Korea has told the US administration that it has produced enough plutonium to make six nuclear bombs, according to US officials.
Pyongyang warned last week that it would move quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials told the New York Times.
But US intelligence agencies believe the North Korean government may be bluffing.
"It's the mirror image of the Iraq problem," one official told the paper.
"We spent years looking for evidence Iraq was lying when it said it didn't have a nuclear programme. Now North Korea says it's about to go nuclear, and everyone is trying to figure out whether they've finally done it, or if it's the big lie."
Preliminary US atmospheric tests to determine if plutonium was being made at North Korean sites suggested that nuclear work has accelerated, but the results were inconclusive. More precise data are expected this week.
North Korea boasted in April that it was working to convert its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium.
The rods had been held under seal until January when Pyongyang broke a 1994 non-proliferation agreement with the US.
President Bush said in May that a nuclear-armed North Korea "will not be tolerated".
But his administration has resisted using military action against the country's main nuclear reprocessing plant, fearing it would be too risky.
Meanwhile, former US defence secretary William Perry has warned that the US and North Korea were drifting towards war, perhaps as early as this year.
He told the Washington Post that Pyongyang would soon have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests and exporting them to terrorists who could plant them in the US.
"I think we are losing control," he said. "The nuclear programme now under way in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities."
China, which played host to inconclusive talks on April 1st among the parties, is pushing a compromise format for talks that it hopes will satisfy both Washington and Pyongyang and bring them back to the table.
The Chinese foreign minister has proposed to break the impasse by having a multilateral framework for the negotiations that would allow for bilateral meetings on the sidelines.