N. Korea can make "unlimited" nuclear arms

North Korea can probably make unlimited quantities of nuclear weapons from its own plutonium stocks, the head of a consortium which until recently was building nuclear power stations there said yesterday.

"I feel very confident that their plutonium programme is now in full operation and it's one that can produce almost unlimited quantities of nuclear weapons," Charles Kartman, executive director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) told the European parliament.

KEDO, of which the European Union is a member, had been building two light-water nuclear reactors, which could not be used for weapons programmes, in North Korea, in exchange for a 1994 pledge by Pyongyang to freeze its own nuclear programme.

KEDO's work was suspended on December 1 for a year to try to persuade North Korea to make good on its offer to abandon its nuclear weapons programme.

Mr Kartman said he believed North Korean scientists probably had the expertise to weaponise the plutonium. "There are people who consider themselves to be expert on this question who believe that... they've had enough years now to work on it that they should be able to weaponise the plutonium that they have," he said.

"The plutonium programme is a very real and very large problem."

He was less sure about Pyongyang's uranium enrichment programme: "Although I have no doubt whatsoever that there is a problem there, its dimensions are beyond my knowledge," he said.

China has been the driving force behind six-nation talks involving North and South Korea, Japan, Russia, the United States and China itself, to resolve Pyongyang's nuclear impasse.

But South Korean experts said last week that North Korea appeared to have lost interest in the talks until after the US presidential elections in November, despite strenuous efforts by Beijing to keep Pyongyang engaged.

KEDO unites Japan, South Korea, the European Union and the United States.