N. Korea Raises Tensions

North Korea said Friday that it has taken further steps toward the manufacture of nuclear bombs, casting doubt on whether long-anticipated security talks with the United States will be held next week as planned.

U.S. officials said they were studying the North Korean statement with top officials of South Korea, Japan and China. They left open the possibility that the meeting, announced Wednesday, could be canceled more abruptly than it was scheduled.

Officials were also weighing conflicting translations of the statement from Pyongyang’s official news agency, one of which was less alarming than the other.

The first, issued by the North Koreans and picked up by Yonhap, the official South Korean news service, said the North has begun extracting plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods taken from an old reactor, a step experts say could allow the regime to build a handful of nuclear weapons within six months. The United States has warned Pyongyang against taking this step.

The version of the statement in Korean, however, appeared to contain a possible grammatical error -- a missing preposition -- making it unclear whether reprocessing has begun or is ready to begin.

Hence a separate CIA translation, sources said late Friday, had the North Koreans saying they were “successfully completing the final phase to the point of the reprocessing operation.” That suggested that the extraction of plutonium, a key threshold in the process of making bombs, has not yet started.

In the past, North Korea has occasionally issued statements that were deliberately vague as part of a negotiating strategy.

“Once we have a clear sense of the facts and the views of our friends and allies, we’ll make a decision about how to proceed,” White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan told reporters accompanying President Bush on an Easter weekend break in Texas.

Officials said they not only were studying the statement’s murky language to see whether Pyongyang really intended such a momentous announcement but were reviewing intelligence to look for independent verification that reprocessing has begun. They have said for weeks that intelligence has shown no signs that Pyongyang has started drawing weapons-grade plutonium from the rods.

One official emphasized that if Pyongyang was drawing plutonium from fuel rods, the United States would view that as an “extremely serious development.”

North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs, U.S. officials say. But if it began building new bombs from the large inventory of plutonium in the spent rods, it could have enough weapons for an offensive nuclear arms program, experts say, and could begin selling nuclear materials or bombs to other countries or terrorists.

If the United States becomes convinced that the North Koreans are intent on creating a large-scale bomb-building operation, officials might launch an effort to bring intense diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. They might also consider a unilateral naval blockade, or even a military strike on North Korea’s nuclear facilities, although Bush has insisted that he is seeking a diplomatic solution.

In its statement, North Korea said the U.S. war on Iraq “teaches a lesson that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent force only.”

As translated by the official North Korean news agency, the statement said the government is successfully reprocessing the fuel rods “in the final stage.” It also asserted that it had sent “interim information” on this to the United States and other countries early in March.

If the CIA translation is correct, the statement “definitely seems less menacing,” said Eric Heginbotham, an Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in Washington. “It seems like they’re trying to put pressure on the U.S. at a moment when they are on the verge of negotiations.”

The upcoming meeting was scheduled after a six-month standoff between the United States and North Korea that began in October when Washington says Pyongyang acknowledged that it had secretly been carrying on a uranium-based nuclear weapons program. Plans for the meeting in China caused a burst of optimism that the North Koreans might be willing to renounce their nuclear program in exchange for U.S. economic and diplomatic aid.

But U.S. officials have said there can be no broad deal unless the North Koreans first agree to a program of strict inspections to verify that they are not conducting a bomb-making operation. If Pyongyang has begun reprocessing, there would be little point in holding a meeting to discuss such a program, experts say.

“I can’t imagine we’d have any incentive to go to the negotiating table once they’d stepped over that line,” said Derek J. Mitchell, a former Pentagon Asia specialist who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Some U.S. officials acknowledged that it was also possible that North Korea’s tough talk was intended to strengthen Pyongyang’s hand, amid an atmosphere of crisis, in advance of the talks.

The message could be: “You’d better take us seriously when we sit down to talk,” said one senior U.S. official.

“It certainly looks like they are upping the ante,” added Han Sung Joo, a South Korean diplomat recently named ambassador to the United States. Earlier Friday, he had predicted to foreign journalists in Seoul that any deal between the U.S. and North Korea on resolving the nuclear standoff would take some time.

“This is going to be an arduous, long process. It’s not going to be a cakewalk,” Han said. “It may take years.”

A South Korean official, who asked not to be quoted by name, said Friday night that North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Han Song Ryol, told people in early March that “they would start to reprocess the fuel, and there were signs that they were preparing to do so -- but no sign that they actually began the reprocessing.”

The fuel rods could produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to build five or six nuclear bombs as large as the one that devastated Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, according to nuclear physicists. Once plutonium was extracted from the rods, it would be only a matter of weeks before a bomb could be built.

North Korea’s main nuclear complex is in Yongbyon, 55 miles north of Pyongyang. The sprawling compound contains not only a 5-megawatt nuclear reactor, from which the spent fuel rods were removed, but a reprocessing factory that the North Koreans call their radiochemical laboratory or “December Enterprises,” after the month of a visit by North Korea’s late founder, Kim Il Sung.

The building, which is six stories high and the length of two football fields, is clearly visible in satellite photographs, and any reprocessing at the facility should have been picked up by U.S. intelligence.

The 8,000 fuel rods in question were stored and sealed in the mid-1990s under the supervision of the U.S. Energy Department and U.N. arms inspectors as part of a 1994 deal under which the North Koreans received energy assistance in return for a freeze of their nuclear program. But that deal collapsed in October after North Korea was caught enriching uranium that could be used for bombs. The North Koreans then kicked out the arms inspectors, removed seals from the cooling pool where the rods were stored and began moving trucks around the reprocessing plant.

Until Friday’s announcement, it was generally believed by North Korea experts that the reprocessing had not begun.

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Richter reported from Washington and Demick from Nara, Japan. Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.