US:Senior intelligence officials have admitted that US claims that North Korea has an active uranium enrichment programme, the basis for a five-year nuclear stand-off between the two countries, may have been mistaken.
The chief intelligence officer for North Korea, Joseph DeTrani, told a senate committee that, although he had "high confidence" that Pyongyang acquired materials for uranium enrichment, there was only "mid-confidence" that such a programme actually exists. In intelligence parlance, "mid-confidence" means that information can be interpreted in various ways, or is not corroborated.
In November 2002, President Bush claimed that North Korea had breached a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration by running a secret uranium enrichment programme.
"We discovered that contrary to an agreement they had with the United States, they're enriching uranium, with a desire of developing a weapon," he said.
The collapse of the 1994 accord after US demands to suspend fuel oil shipments to North Korea allowed Pyongyang to restart a plutonium facility it had suspended as part of the deal.
Both plutonium and highly enriched uranium can be used for nuclear weapons, and last October North Korea used the plutonium it had acquired since 2002 for a nuclear weapons test.
"The administration appears to have made a very costly decision that has resulted in a four-fold increase in the nuclear weapons of North Korea. If that was based in part on mixing up North Korea's ambitions with their accomplishments, it's important," Democratic senator Jack Reed told the New York Times.
The administration says there is no doubt that Pakistan sold North Korea up to 20 centrifuges to enrich uranium, but now admits that there is little evidence that the centrifuges were actually used to develop a uranium enrichment programme.
For a number of years after the collapse of the bilateral agreement in 2002, Washington insisted that Pyongyang must admit that it was secretly enriching uranium before a new agreement could be negotiated.
North Korea has consistently denied that it has a uranium enrichment programme.
The timing of this week's admission has led some in Washington to suspect that intelligence officials fear that, when UN inspectors return to North Korea under a deal sealed last month, they will find that US intelligence assessments about that country's weapons of mass destruction were as inaccurate as US claims about Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons capability.
