North Korea Says It Has Made Fuel for Atom Bombs

North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today.

The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies — under fire for their assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability — to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing the material undetected.

Officials said today that the answer was unclear. A preliminary set of atmospheric tests for the presence of a gas given off as nuclear waste is reprocessed into plutonium is the best indicator the United States has from one of the world's most closed nations. The most recent tests suggested that nuclear work has accelerated, but the results were inconclusive. More test results are expected at the end of this week.