That's a question American diplomats may already be facing from Asian powers like China and South Korea, after Iraq weapons hunter David Kay delivered a damning post-mortem on intelligence used to justify the Iraq war.

"We were almost all wrong" Kay told a Senate committee last week, setting off a political timebomb for the Bush administration.

His admission also raised questions about the quality of intelligence used to back up another US claim -- that North Korea had a covert program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, which set off the crisis in 2002.

A State Department official denied the Iraq debacle had "anything to do" with North Korea, but some US proliferation experts are not so sure.

"The fact that we got it so wrong on Iraq is having an impact on North Korea," said John Wolfstahl, of the non proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

China, trying to broker new six-way crisis talks on the crisis, recently told Japan it did not believe Pyongyang had a enriched uranium program, the Washington Post reported this month.

And South Korea has privately expressed similar doubts, sources in Washington said.

But US officials are defending their accusations.

"The United States has not changed its view that North Korea has a highly enriched uranium program," said the State Department official on condition of anonymity.

And a former US envoy to talks with North Korea, part of an unofficial American delegation to Pyongyang in January, is also convinced US data on Iraq's alleged highly enriched uranium program is accurate.

"I was not sceptical of the intelligence," said former State Department official Jack Pritchard, at a Brookings Institution breifing two weeks ago.

"I believe it was accurate."

Doubts over the quality of US intelligence were fanned by a controversy exposed by Pritchard's trip, which also included a US academic and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker.

Senior North Korean officials used the meetings to deny US claims that they admitted in October 2002 to US envoy James Kelly, to having a highly enriched uranium program.

In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Hecker quoted North Korean Vice Minister Kim Gye Gwan as saying "'We have no program, we have no equipment, and we have no technical expertise for enriching uranium.'"

North Korean officials said their translation of the Kelly meeting did not support the claim that they had owned up.

But Kelly said last week he remained "convinced by that conversation that a uranium enrichment program was admitted."

"This is information that we're very strongly convinced about."

The United States has never publicly divulged data on which it based its assessment.

But sources here said the intelligence centered on North Korean attempts to procure technology typical of a highly enriched uranium program, and contacts made by Pyongyang's agents.

But by October 2002, there apparently was no proof that North Korea had established a specific facility to enrich uranium.

Some analysts fear the controversy over highly enriched uranium could become a sideshow when six-nation talks, originally pencilled in for December finally take place, possibly next month.

Washington could thwart North Korean attempts to inflame the issue by sharing the intelligence with its allies, said Wolfstahl.

"The United States has not at this point even complied with South Korean requests to share our intelligence on why we are convinced there is an highly enriched program in North Korea," he said.

"We have doubts and we have those doubts reinforced by our unwillingness to share our information."

US accusations that North Korea had embarked on a program to enrich uranium, in violation of several anti-nuclear pacts pitched the Cold War rivals into their worst crises in years.

North Korea kicked out international arms inspectors and unfroze a previous nuclear program based on plutonium, which had been mothballed in a 1994 anti-nuclear deal with the United States, and pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The United States cut off fuel shipments mandated by the 1994 deal and warned it would not reward the Stalinist state for "bad behavior."

WAR.WIRE