N. Korea explosion apparently not a nuke

SEOUL, South Korea – South Korean and U.S. officials said Sunday that a massive explosion that generated a billowing cloud of smoke on North Korea’s northern border with China on Thursday was an unspecified accident and apparently not a much-feared nuclear test.

“We are investigating the size and the reason of the accident, but we do not believe North Korea conducted a nuclear test,” Kim Jong Min, South Korean presidential spokesman, said Sunday.

Details of the blast, which came amid increasing concerns in U.S. intelligence circles in recent weeks that North Korea was about to conduct a nuclear test, remained sketchy. But South Korean officials said they recorded none of the seismic activity that likely would accompany a nuclear test.

In Washington, U.S. officials scrambled Saturday night to gather more information about the reports of an explosion and to study satellite photos of the site, but as dawn broke Sunday, Bush administration officials were eager to play down the significance of the explosion, in contrast to the administration’s handling of intelligence reports about Iraq in the months leading up to the war.

Making the rounds of the Sunday news shows, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said there was no indication that the blast was related to a nuclear test.

“We don’t think, at this point, it was a nuclear event, but we’re looking at it and will get further analysis,” Rice said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “There are all kinds of reports and all kinds of assessments are going on. Maybe it was a fire, some kind of forest fire.”

Powell acknowledged that the administration has been studying reports of suspicious activity at a possible nuclear test site, though officials have said the activity was at a different location than the explosion. “We’re monitoring this,” Powell said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We have been watching it. We can’t tell whether it’s normal maintenance activity or something more. So it’s inconclusive at this moment.”

Nevertheless, the date of the blast – a day commemorating the 1948 founding of North Korea – had U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials scrambling to determine what might have caused the huge explosion. North Korea is known to put great importance on historic dates, using them to conduct high-profile military exercises and parades.

One official in Washington said the Americans were examining satellite images of the explosion – which South Korea’s semiofficial Yonhap News Agency said generated a mushroom formation as large as 2.5 miles in diameter – and that further information had been provided to the U.S. government by a diplomatic source in Beijing.

However, the official said the explosion did not take place at the location that had been closely monitored in recent weeks by U.S. intelligence agencies. The surveillance was due to suspicious movement of vehicles that some analysts believed indicated preparation for a nuclear test.

The explosion – reportedly larger than a chemical blast near a train station in North Korea in April that killed 150 people – took place in northern Yanggang Province near its mountainous border with China, South Korean officials said. In 1999, a South Korean presidential spokesman said in an interview that North Korea was building an underground ballistic-missile launching facility in that region for the Taepodong-1, a missile that North Korea test-fired over Japan in 1998, and the longer-range Taepodong-2, which is believed to be in the final stages of development. Since then, some analysts have suspected that the heavily militarized and remote area might also house a new, intermediate North Korean missile with a range between 1,800 and 2,500 miles and might additionally be a facility used for uranium reprocessing.

In December 2002, a missile engine test is believed to have caused an explosion that destroyed facilities at North Korea’s launching pad in Musudanri, North Hamkyong Province, though it was quickly rebuilt for a successful test of the Taepodong-2’s main engine last May, intelligence officials now believe.