Edition: U.S. / Global   Published: July 15, 2003  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.  ''It's
the mirror