North Korea has raised the stakes dramatically in its confrontation with the United States by privately threatening to conduct its first underground nuclear test, and the United States fears that this declaration could be a prelude to an atomic attack.

A senior official of the hardline Communist regime warned in New York that his country would take countermeasures, "for example, a nuclear test," if the United States did not ease pressure on his isolated country.

The warning, by Han Sung Ryol, North Korea's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, was delivered to an American official earlier this month, according to reports circulating in Tokyo. The test would be conducted inside a tunnel dug into a mountain in the run-up to Sept. 9, the anniversary of the republic's foundation, the respected Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported.

Officials in Tokyo close to the Pyongyang (North Korea's capital) regime say if Washington does not offer a nonaggression guarantee for abandoning its nuclear program, North Korea is prepared to announce it has become the world's ninth nuclear power.

Senior American officials, who are reluctant to rule out future military action, fear that the warning shows that the rogue state's relations with the United States are out of control.

William Perry, a former secretary of defense under President Clinton, warned that Pyongyang may have acquired six to eight nuclear weapons by the end of the year, allowing the regime to target Japan, South Korea and even Hawaii in the United States.

"I think we are losing control of the situation," he said. "The nuclear program underway in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities."

In an effort to block any export of weapons from North Korea, the United States has assembled a group of 10 other nations, including Britain, which have agreed to intercept suspicious North Korean shipping.

The deteriorating situation has fueled increasing concerns of an arms race in Asia, with Russia and Japan watching the standoff between North Korea and the United States with growing trepidation.

Japan has already begun to rethink its postwar pacifist stance, while Russia's deputy foreign minister, Alexander Losyukov, said that Moscow had begun to take steps to defend itself from the possible use of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Testing of the civil defense resources has already started in the districts bordering North Korea.

Despite the moves to blockade shipping, the Bush administration appears increasingly divided over how to deal with the crisis. State Department officials indicated recently that a written security guarantee to North Korea might be possible, but the suggestion was immediately dismissed by the White House.

In the Pentagon, meanwhile, hawks are privately discussing the possibility of launching a "surgical strike" similar to the Israeli raid carried out on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. A State Department official told The Telegraph: "More than a few people are worried about where we might end up six months down the road. This impasse is not going to be the status quo forever."
Under its eccentric dictator Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang has never officially claimed membership in the "nuclear club," though it admitted last October that it was pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program. The eight countries acknowledged to possess nuclear weapons are the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India and Israel.

The White House is counting on multilateral negotiations involving China, South Korea and Japan to defuse the situation.

—Source: Daily Telegraph (London).