US spy satellites show North Korea is moving fuel rods around a key nuclear complex but there is no sign that reprocessing - which is critical to making bombs - has begun, American officials said today.
Even as they try to keep the North Korea crisis on a diplomatic track, Bush administration officials seem increasingly convinced that Pyongyang is determined to launch full-scale production of nuclear weapons - an ominous development especially as Washington moves toward war with Iraq.
As there has been for the last month, "there is still activity around Yongbyon, some of it associated with the reactor, an immediate thing that's not as bad as reprocessing but still isn't good," a senior official said.
"I don't discount that they might begin reprocessing in the next month or do another missile launch," but there are no signs of preparations for such a test, he said.
Another official said Yongbyon is "bustling with activity. There are canisters and vehicles moving about. It's hard to rule in or out that spent fuel rods are on the move but it's certainly plausible."
US officials in recent weeks have detected that North Korea had moved quantities of fresh fuel rods to the area of a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It is in the reactor where the unused uranium fuel rods are converted to plutonium.
Today, there were mixed reports about whether Pyongyang had taken a more significant step and begun moving 8,000 spent fuel rods - which have already gone through the reactor - from a holding pond where they had been mothballed under a 1994 agreement with the US.
In the nuclear process, spent fuel rods go through a reprocessing facility where the plutonium is extracted to become fuel for nuclear weapons.