SEOUL, South Korea – U.S. and South Korean officials said Sunday that a massive explosion Thursday that generated a mushroom cloud of smoke more than two miles wide on North Korea’s border with China was an unspecified accident and apparently not a 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. The White House periodically receives reports that North Korea is seeking to test a nuclear weapon, a senior Bush administration official said.
But South Korean officials said they recorded none of the seismic activity that likely would accompany a nuclear test.
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 Korea and Japanese officials scrambling to determine what might have caused the huge explosion.
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.
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.
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