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North Korea has triggered a new crisis over its nuclear ambitions by expelling UN inspectors and pledging to resume plutonium reprocessing - a precursor to producing atomic weapons.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, confirmed yesterday that it had, at Pyongyang’s request, removed seals and surveillance equipment from the Yongbyon plant, delivering a blow to the 2007 deal scrapping its atomic weapons programmes.

In a closed session of the IAEA’s board in Vienna, the deputy director-general, Olli Heinonen, said North Korea had informed the inspectors that it planned to “introduce nuclear material to the reprocessing plant in one week’s time”.

The move cast new doubt on years of attempts to denuclearise the isolated state at a time of deepening uncertainty abut the health of its reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il. Six-party disarmament talks stalled last month when North Korea stopped disabling Yongbyon in protest at delays in being removed from a US blacklist of states supporting terrorism.

The White House called the latest development “very disappointing”. Any resumption of reprocessing would “further isolate North Korea”, said a spokesman. But Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, insisted that negotiations were still alive even if they appeared to be unravelling. “We’ve been through ups and downs in this process before,” she said. “But this is a six-party process, and that means that there are other states that are carrying the same message to North Korea about their obligations.”

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