The assessment, by the Central Intelligence Agency, confirms the Bush administration's fears about the accelerated nature of North Korea's secret uranium weapons programme, which some intelligence officials believe could produce a weapon as early as sometime next year, the New York Times quoted American and Asian officials as saying.

The report was presented to the White House last week.

The assessment, the paper says, is based in part on Pakistan's accounts of its interrogations of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the developer of Pakistan's 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, including nuclear fuel, centrifuges and one or more warhead designs.

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 to produce plutonium bombs.