NORTH KOREA could carry out a nuclear test as early as tomorrow, according to Chinese sources.

Preparations to detonate a bomb at a 2,000 metre-deep abandoned coalmine close to the Chinese border have reportedly been completed, enabling North Korea to go ahead with the controversial test as the leaders of Japan and China hold urgent talks at a summit in Beijing.

Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader who celebrates 19 years as head of his country’s Workers’ Party tomorrow, is reported to have given orders that the test should “not excessively rock” Mount Paetku, a nearby peak considered sacred by many Koreans.

The threat of a nuclear test will dominate tomorrow’s talks between President Hu Jintao of China and Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, who took office only 15 days ago.

The talks were intended to resurrect relations between Asia’s economic powerhouses, which have been put under severe strain by repeated visits made by Junichiro Koizumi, the former Japanese Prime Minister, to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, where war criminals and Japan’s military past are glorified. No Japanese prime minister has been to China for five years and the leaders of the two countries have not met and talked at all for more than 18 months.

However, matters of history are likely to be set aside because of the threat of the nuclear test. Political analysts believe that the North Korean nuclear crisis, though a severe test for regional stability, may create a useful environment for the summit. The two sides will have a serious and immediate issue to discuss and resolve, rather than an agenda of smaller bilateral issues that have been allowed to fester.

On Monday Mr Abe will travel from Beijing to Seoul and face a second summit where a similar challenge awaits: repairing a vital relationship stuck in an icy 12-month limbo through a combination of his predecessor’s shrine visits and a South Korean leadership unwilling to ignore them.

It is no coincidence that the two summits are taking place so soon after Mr Abe’s election: even the most nationalist MPs recognise that Japan’s relations with its neighbours cannot continue to sink without some kind of salvage effort.

Government leaks suggest that plans for the Beijing and Seoul meetings were set in motion long before Mr Abe won the vote to become president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

But the window for Mr Abe to make real progress is narrow. As a Cabinet Office insider explained: “Abe is not a famed negotiator, and his instinctive nationalism is, in the long term, more likely to be a source of friction than assistance to the Japan-China and Japan-South Korea relationship.

“But at this stage, and it may be very brief, Abe carries the trump card that he is simply not Koizumi.”

As a possible indication of how seriously he takes the opportunity, Mr Abe acknowledged last week the responsibility of his grandfather, a former prime minister, and other former leaders, for Japan’s wartime actions, adding that he stood by the two official statements issued by Japan in the 1990s apologising for imperial aggression and other wartime atrocities.

However, that position was reversed yesterday when Mr Abe described the 1946 Tokyo war crimes tribunal’s classification of 14 Japanese wartime leaders as Class A war criminals “ridiculous”.

Beyond the nuclear crisis, Mr Abe’s talks with his Chinese counterpart are likely to focus on energy issues. The North Korea issue has embarrassed China when it was keen to display its rising influence in the region. Foreign Ministry officials said that the success of the talks depended on Japan not exploiting China’s loss of face.

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