US claims Pakistan gave nuclear aid to the North Koreans

Pakistan, a key US ally in the war against terror, has been named as a major supplier of equipment for North Korea's secret programme to develop nuclear weapons, whose disclosure this week stunned the Bush administration.

The charge was hotly denied yesterday in Islamabad, where General Hamid Gul a former head of Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence service, insisted there had been no exchange of his country's nuclear technology for North Korean missiles. "North Korea's technology has always been ahead of ours," he said. He claimed China and Russia were the suppliers. "We are no position to help them." But the Russian Foreign Ministry also denied any part in the Korean programme.

Whatever the truth – and US intelligence officials are confident Pakistan, Russia and China are involved – the episode illustrates the ambiguities and contradictions enveloping Washington's attempts to widen the war against terrorism to Iraq, and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

The New York Times said the equipment may have included the gas centrifuges needed to create weapons-grade enriched uranium (the same technology secretly used by Iraq before the Gulf War). It appeared to have been part of a barter deal in the late Nineties, trading Korean missiles to bolster Pakistan's defences against India, for nuclear technology.

If so, a mystery which baffled Clinton administration officials – of how a near-broke Pakistan found the hard currency for North Korean missile technology – would be solved. But the answer only raises other, even more troubling questions.

Pakistan was closer than any other country to the fallen Taliban regime in Afghanistan. That uncomfortable fact, and the undemocratic rule of General Pervez Musharraf, have been ignored by the US, to secure Islamabad's co-operation in rooting out remnants of al-Qa'ida and other Islamic groups now based in Pakistan.

But it has been supplying the tools which qualify North Korea for its membership of President George Bush's "axis of evil". The revelation that Pyongyang probably has nuclear weapons is forcing the administration to rely on diplomatic means to persuade the North to abandon them, in contrast to the sabre-rattling against Iraq which is generally conceded to represent no immediate nuclear threat.

This week, John Bolton, the Under Secretary of State, and Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly have been in Beijing, trying to persuade China, which is reckoned to have the closest ties to North Korea, to exert pressure on the reclusive regime of Kim Jong Il.

North Korea also will dominate next week's talks between Mr Bush and the Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, at the President's ranch in Texas. Mr Bush had intended to try to line up Chinese support for the toughest possible United Nations resolution on Iraq. Now Mr Bush will have to discuss damage control on North Korea, and prevent this arms-control crisis from interfering with his strategy against Saddam Hussein.

The White House insists the cases are not comparable. "Effective international pressure may have an effect on North Korea," Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser, said. "Saddam Hussein is in a category by himself."