N. Korea: Capable Of 6 Bombs?

Nuclear Agency Chief Says Pyongyang Might Have Enough Plutonium

(AP) 
"I hope that we can persuade them in some way not to go that route, down that road," U.S. Senator Carl Levin said on the ABC television network.

The reported U.S. warnings reflected growing fears in Washington that the North is going ahead with efforts to develop nuclear weapons after South Korean officials said Pyongyang had recently shut down a reactor, possibly to harvest plutonium that could be used in an underground test.

The Yongbyon reactor generated spent fuel rods laced with plutonium, but they must be removed and reprocessed to extract the plutonium for use in an atomic weapon. They can be removed only if the reactor has been shut down.

The U.S. intelligence community believes North Korea has one or more nuclear weapons, and has untested two- and three-stage missiles capable of reaching U.S. soil. But it has been unclear whether Pyongyang has yet developed the technology to miniaturize a nuclear weapon so it fits on a missile, and provide it with the guidance systems so it can hit a target.

Six-nation talks aimed at getting Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions have been stalled for nearly a year. They involve North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.

North Korea has boycotted the talks since June, and on Friday reaffirmed it would stay away unless the United States dropped what it called hostile policy toward the communist regime.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Sunday that grave concerns over North Korea's nuclear program soared during the first Clinton administration, when "we were afraid that ... North Korea was the most dangerous place in the world."

"We were in the process of trying to come to some arrangement with them, which would not leave us in a situation where now we believe that they may have enough nuclear material to make six to eight nuclear weapons," she said on CNN. "So I would say the that real issue here is a complete failure in Bush administration policy toward North Korea that has now put us in a very, very serious situation where they might test."