SEOUL, May 11: A US envoy confirmed on Wednesday that North Korea had begun preparations for a nuclear test as Pyongyang claimed it had taken a key step towards the manufacture of more atomic bombs. According to some estimates, North Korea is believed to have as many as eight nuclear weapons, but has never tested one so far.

US Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer, confirming media speculation from the United States, said that could soon change. “I believe they have taken some preparatory steps,” the newly-appointed envoy was quoted as saying in Tokyo at a meeting with a Japanese ruling coalition leader.

Mr Schieffer is the first US official to go on record as saying that a nuclear test could be in the works, after unnamed officials were quoted in the New York Times last week.

According to satellite and other intelligence data, those officials believe Pyongyang is building a reviewing stand and filling in a tunnel, clear pointers to a potential underground nuclear test.

Mr Schieffer believed there was a ‘high possibility’ of a nuclear test, according to a Japanese official.

South Korean officials have been sceptical about the reports that North Korea was preparing a test at Kilju, in northeastern North Korea, where satellite images show the suspected tunnel.

South Korean and US intelligence agencies have been watching the tunnel since the late 1990s and officials in Seoul said as recently as Wednesday that they had neither detected signs nor received intelligence from the United States that would indicate test preparations.

In a separate development, North Korea said it had completed unloading 8,000 spent fuel rods form its nuclear reactor, a step that would allow it to reprocess enough plutonium for six bombs.

North Korea shut down the reactor last month, allowing it to unload the spent fuel and remove it for reprocessing.

“The relevant field of the DPRK (North Korea) has successfully finished the unloading of 8,000 spent fuel rods from the 5MW (megawatt) pilot nuclear plant in the shortest period recently,” a foreign ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.

The spokesman added that North Korea ‘keeps taking necessary measures to bolster its nuclear arsenal for the defensive purpose of coping with the prevailing situation, with a main emphasis on developing the self-reliant nuclear power industry’.

The five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, 90kms north of Pyongyang, was frozen under a 1994 deal with the United States which collapsed in 2002 following US allegations that North Korea was still pursuing nuclear weapons.

The US government believes North Korea already had enough plutonium for one or two crude nuclear devices before the deal collapsed.—AFP