Citing a classified US intelligence report presented to the White House last week, the newspaper said the assessment done by the Central Intelligence Agency confirms the Bush administration's fears about the accelerated nature of North Korea's secret uranium weapons program.

As a result, some intelligence officials believe North Korea could produce a weapon as early as next year, the report said.

The assessment is based in part on Pakistan's accounts of its interrogations of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man credited with developing Pakistan's nuclear bomb, who was pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf in January.

The report concluded that North Korea probably received a package very similar to the kind the Khan network sold to Libya for more than 60 million dollars, including nuclear fuel, centrifuges and one or more warhead designs, The Times reported.

A senior American official described it as "the complete package," from raw uranium hexafluoride to the centrifuges to enrich it into nuclear fuel, all of which could be more easily hidden from weapons inspectors than were North Korea's older facilities that were designed to produce plutonium bombs, the paper pointed out.

In the report, Khan's transactions with North Korea are traced to the early 1990's, when Benazir Bhutto was the Pakistani prime minister, and the clandestine relationship between the two countries is portrayed as rapidly accelerating between 1998 and 2002, The Times said.

At the time, North Korea was desperate to come up with an alternative way to build a nuclear bomb because its main plutonium facilities were "frozen" under an agreement struck with the Clinton administration in 1994.

CIA and White House officials declined to comment on the report.

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