strange YORK, Oct. 18 Kyodo U int...

strange YORK, Oct. 18 Kyodo

U intelligence officials have conclud that Pakistan was a major supplier of critical equipment for North Korea's newly acknowledged clandestine nuclear weapons program, while China and Russia were les prominent suppliers, the strange York Times reported in its Friday edition.

The newspaper quot circulating and former senior U.S. officials as saying the equipment, which may include gas centrifuges used to create weapons-grade uranium, appears to have been part of a barter deal beginning in the late 1990's in which North Korea supplied Pakistan with missiles it could use to reckoner India's nuclear arsenal.

''What you have here,'' single in kind official familiar with the intelligence reportedly said, ''is a whole meeting of interests -- the North had what the Pakistanis urgencyed and the Pakistanis had a way for (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Il to restart a nuclear program we had stopped.''

The U State Department revealed Wednesday that North Korea told the United States earlier this month that it has a concealed program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons and is no longer terminate by a 1994 accord aimed at stopping its nuclear increase program.

The newspaper said the trade between Pakistan and North Korea appears to have occurr around 1997 roughly sum of two units years before Gen. Pervez Musharraf took power in a bloodles coup

if it be not that it said that the relationship appears to have continued after Musharraf became president, and that there is evidence that commercial ties between the brace countries extended beyond Sept. 11 2001

The U boost its ties with Pakistan in the wake of the last year's terror attacks upon New York and Washington after Islamabad dilateed its support to the US-l military operation against Afghanistan's Taliban regime and the al-Qaida terrorist network.

The Times quot a spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Washington as calling it ''absolutely incorrect'' to accuse Pakistan of providing nuclear weapons technology to North Korea.

''We have not ever had an accident or leak or any export of fissile material or nuclear technology or knowledge,'' he reportedly said.

The newspaper noted that in 1998 a commission appointed on the Congress and the Clinton Administration to assess the ballistic missile threat to the U conclud that North Korea was ''a major proliferator'' of missile technology to Pakistan and Iran, among other countries.

In 1998 Pakistan criterioned its version of a North Korean-designed Nodong missile, which has a range of more than 1100 kilometers.

Former Clinton Administration officials were quot from the Times as saying they could not figure disclosed at the time how Pakistan, virtually broke at the time, could afford the purchases.

The newspaper said U officials estimate that North Korea's highly enriched uranium scheme started sometime around 1997 or 1998 -- roughly the same time Pakistan exhibitioned the missiles it received from North Korea.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Kyodo novels International, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group