NORTH KOREA yesterday threatened to test a nuclear weapon and declare itself a nuclear state, US officials attending the six-nation disarmament talks in Beijing revealed.

The North Korean delegation said that it had “no choice but to declare its possession of nuclear weapons” and that it would “conduct a nuclear weapons test”, a US official said, quoting an official summary.

According to the official. the threat upset China, the country hosting the talks, and wrong-footed the Bush Administration. President Bush’s top Cabinet members — Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — are expected to meet next week to decide strategy. Mr Bush has stated that he would not tolerate a nuclear North Korea.

The tough talk in Beijing fuelled expectations among Washington’s hawks that the Bush Administration would agree stringent measures against the world’s last Stalinist state. “The more the North Koreans escalate, the more it turns public opinion against them,” one US official said.

However, other US officials and some of the other delegations gave a different account of the meeting. The White House played down the latest North Korean declaration and insisted that the talks were going well.

“The assessment from our team that’s on the ground . . . is that this is a positive session that they’ve been having,” Claire Buchan, the White House spokeswoman, said. She spoke of “excellent co- operation” among Washington and its partners. “North Korea has long history of making inflammatory statements that serve to isolate it from the rest of the world,” she said.

A Japanese official in Beijing said that tempers rose among the North Korean delegation on the second day of the talks. “The North Korean side got hot, but stopped short of getting overexcited,” the official said, noing the “harsh” words sometimes chosen by the delegates from Pyongyang. Earlier, Russian and South Korean delegates had said that North Korea had emphasised its goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.

America believes that North Korea, which fired a rocket over Japan in 1998, already has one or two nuclear weapons and the means to build several more within months.

The US delegation is expected to attend Friday’s final plenary session and consult China before returning home.

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