WASHINGTON, May 5: US President George W. Bush sees it as unlikely that North Korea will be persuaded to halt production of nuclear-weapons material and is trying to muster international resolve to prevent Pyongyang from exporting plutonium, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The move represents a change in the decade-long US policy on North Korea that it should be blocked from producing plutonium or highly enriched uranium by any means necessary.

Citing US and foreign officials, the Times said Bush discussed the strategy with Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Saturday at Bush’s Texas ranch when the two leaders received a long briefing from Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who is the top US negotiator with North Korea.

“The president (Bush) said that the central worry is not what they’ve got, but where it goes,” an official familiar with the Bush- Howard talks told the Times. “He’s very pragmatic about it, and the reality is that we probably won’t know the extent of what they are producing. So the whole focus is to keep the plutonium from going further.”

In 1994, then-US president Bill Clinton threatened North Korea with a military strike on its nuclear plant at Yongbyon and had the Defence Department draw up attack plans when Pyongyang said it was going to begin nuclear production - a crisis that was averted later that year with an agreement that the United States and its allies would provide energy aid in return for North Korea agreeing to dismantle its nuclear-weapons programme.

But US officials have recently said that they believe Clinton’s policy is no longer sustainable, and South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun “has made it clear he won’t consider military action of any kind”, one senior Bush administration official told the Times.

The policy would require excellent intelligence on North Korea, something that has been lacking. For instance, US officials have been so far unable to confirm whether Pyongyang’s assertions that it has restarted production of nuclear-weapons material are true or find new nuclear facilities that they believe Pyongyang is building.

It would also require cozying-up to China, across whose border North Korea could easily transport weapons-grade nuclear material.

While the new policy is a gamble, one official told the Times that Bush’s answer to North Korea’s nuclear threats is “You’re hungry, and you can’t eat plutonium.”

The report said another official who has discussed the issue with Bush said his thinking was that the North Koreans “are looking to get us excited, to make us issue declarations.”—dpa/Reuters