North Korea has told the United States that it has finished reprocessing used nuclear fuel into bomb-grade plutonium and U.S. officials are seeking to verify the claim, the White House said on Tuesday.

In what amounted to another threatening move by Pyongyang in its standoff with Washington, North Korean diplomats at the United Nations informed their U.S. counterparts last week that reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods has been completed.

"Now this is something that we are evaluating. As you know North Korea has made a lot of claims in the past and it's not something at this time that we can confirm the accuracy of," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

North Korea had 8,000 spent fuel rods as part of a plutonium-based nuclear weapons program at the Yongbyon nuclear site that was frozen under a 1994 nuclear deal between North Korea and the United States.

Analysts believe if those fuel rods were efficiently converted, they could produce enough plutonium for a half-dozen nuclear weapons. The CIA believes North Korea already has one or two nuclear weapons.

The United States went to war against Iraq over Saddam Hussein's yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction. But so far Washington still wants a peaceful solution leading to North Korea's verifiable dismantling of its nuclear weapons program, while not ruling out a military option.

"We are continuing to seek a diplomatic solution through a multilateral approach working with China and South Korea and Japan and others to address the situation in North Korea," McClellan said.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita did not answer directly when asked whether the United States was moving closer to hostilities with North Korea.

'SERIOUS SITUATION'

"Let me just say: the situation with North Korea is a serious situation and it's something that we should take seriously. And it's a problem not for the United States, it's a problem for the world," he said.

Asked about planning for possible military action by the United States, Di Rita said, "I can't rule something in or out of the president's mind. At the moment, he is focused on diplomatic activities, and that's what we're going to be doing."

Former Defense Secretary William Perry warned that the United States and North Korea are drifting toward war, perhaps as early as this year. "I think we are losing control," of the situation, Perry told the Washington Post.

U.S. officials fear North Korea's atomic weapons programs could destabilize the Korean Peninsula, spark a nuclear arms race throughout Asia and lead to wider weapons proliferation if Pyongyang were to sell nuclear weapons or technology.

U.S. officials were cool to a Chinese proposal on how to get Washington and Pyongyang back to the negotiating table after an April 1 meeting that went nowhere.

Washington wants multilateral talks while Pyongyang demands bilateral talks with the United States before any multilateral discussions.

The Chinese foreign minister has proposed breaking the impasse by having a multilateral framework for the negotiations that would allow for bilateral meetings on the sidelines.

"It doesn't deal with the serious issues that are involved in North Korea's affronts to the entire international community," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

A senior White House official said any talks should be in a multilateral format.

"If individuals or delegations want to sit around the table and talk directly to one another that's certainly a constructive way to talk but as we say a multilateral forum is a multilateral forum," the official said.

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