U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged China on Tuesday to use its influence to press North Korea to make a full declaration of its nuclear programs so that a disarmament deal can move forward.

North Korea has promised to abandon all nuclear weapons programs in exchange for economic and diplomatic incentives under an agreement between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States reached in Beijing in 2005.

However, the deal has been stymied by Pyongyang's failure to meet an end-2007 deadline to disclose its nuclear programs.

"I'm expecting from China what I am expecting from others -- that we will use all influence possible with the North Koreans to convey to them it's time to move forward," Rice told reporters.

"We are (on) the cusp of something very special here," she said, citing North Korea's decision to initially shut down the Yongbyon reactor at the heart of its atomic program. "Now it's time to move on."

A senior U.S. official said Rice hoped her Asian trip would act as "a real catalyst to get over this bar of a good declaration" and she particularly wanted help from China, North Korea's major trading partner and traditional Communist ally.

"We continue to believe that if anyone is capable of convincing the North that this kind of transparency is the only way forward, it's the Chinese," said the official, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the diplomacy.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said Beijing favored intensified diplomacy to overcome the latest setback in the long-running nuclear negotiations.

"The Chinese side hopes that the parties will treasure the results we have already produced, which have not come easily, and bear in mind the bigger picture and ... increase the dialogue and consultations among the parties...," Yang told reporters.

According to U.S. officials and analysts, the sticking point has been Pyongyang's reluctance to discuss any nuclear technology it may have transferred to other nations, notably Syria, as well as its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment.

The United States has questions about any possible North Korean role in a suspected Syrian covert nuclear site that was bombed by Israel in September. Syria has denied having a nuclear program but the case remains murky.

Pakistan on Wednesday [February 13] test-fired the short-range, nuclear-capable Ghaznavi ballistic missile which can target northern and western Indian cities as the government vowed to "retain a strong conventional and unconventional deterrence".

A strategic missile group of the Pakistan Army conducted a successful training launch of the Ghaznavi or Hatf-III missile with a range of 290 km at the end of an annual field training exercise. The location of the firing was not disclosed by the military.

This was the third test of nuclear-capable missiles by Pakistan since late January.

Earlier, the Shaheen-I ballistic missile, which has a range of 700 km, and the Ghauri ballistic missile with a range of 1,300 km, were successfully tested by the Army's Strategic Force Command (ASFC).

Wednesday’s launch was witnessed by caretaker Prime Minister Mohammedmian Soomro, army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani senior military officers and scientists.

A statement issued by the army said, "With this launch, ASFC also concluded its highly successful winter collective training, wherein various missile groups conducted firing of live ballistic missiles under a realistic operational environment."

Soomro said Pakistan stood for peace in the region. "Peace comes from strength whereas weakness invites aggression. The Pakistani government is fully committed to retain a strong conventional and unconventional deterrence and will meet all the needs of a strong national defence," he said addressing the troops.

Iran is testing an advanced centrifuge at its Natanz nuclear complex, diplomats said on Wednesday, a move that could lead to Tehran enriching uranium much faster and gaining the means to build atom bombs.

Iran says it wants nuclear energy only for electricity so it can export more oil. But it is under sanctions for hiding the program until 2003, preventing U.N. inspectors since then from verifying it is wholly peaceful and refusing to suspend it.

Tehran's quest to produce usable amounts of nuclear fuel has been hampered by problems getting a 1970s vintage of centrifuge, the "P-1", to run nonstop at maximum speed. Iran had 3,000 P-1s working by November, a basis for launching industrial-scale enrichment, but only at an estimated 10 percent of capacity.

But diplomats tracking Iran's dossier said it had started mechanical tests, without nuclear material inside, of a more durable, efficient model in the pilot wing of the Natanz plant.

"The Iranians have begun to run in the advanced model. It's not yet known what stage the testing has reached or exactly how many there are, although it appears to be several dozen," said a Western diplomat with access to intelligence.

A senior diplomat familiar with the International Atomic Energy Agency's file on Iran confirmed it recently began testing centrifuges based on a "P-2" design, used more recently in the West and able to enrich uranium 2-3 times as fast as the P-1.

He declined to elaborate, saying details would come in a report IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei will deliver to the Vienna-based agency's 35-nation Board of Governors and the U.N. Security Council later this month.

It was not known how successful the "dry runs" with the new machines had been or when they might be test-fed with uranium gas for enrichment. Iran had no immediate comment.

But diplomats and analysts said Iran had decided to install no more of the antiquated P-1s in Natanz's main, underground production hall and expand capacity instead only with their more efficient successor.

"On the positive side, (shifting advanced centrifuge activity) to the pilot plant at Natanz would bring the program under more international scrutiny (through IAEA inspections)," said David Albright, a physicist and non-proliferation expert.

ACCELERATING CAPABILITY?

"On balance, though, I believe this is a disturbing development. Iran appears to have made progress in secret on the P-2 and may now be close to enriching uranium with it," said Albright, head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security and an ex-U.N. weapons inspector.

Iran first revealed in 2006 that it was developing supposedly state-of-the-art centrifuges at workshops put off-limits to IAEA inspectors in retaliation for steps by Western powers to impose initial sanctions on Tehran.

The IAEA got a first, one-off look at the advanced centrifuge effort when Iran allowed ElBaradei to visit a workshop in Tehran last month in a gesture of transparency, diplomats versed in the Iran file said.

This was no breakthrough in Western eyes. Diplomats said Iran could not defuse mistrust in its nuclear agenda unless it accepted a binding regime of broader, snap inspections by agency professionals, and suspended enrichment-related activity.

ElBaradei has urged Iran to adopt the IAEA's Additional Protocol, which would allow far-ranging inspections to assess how close Iran may be to mastering enrichment technology and verify that it is not being turned to illicit military ends.

But Tehran has linked fuller cooperation with an end to sanctions, extending a frozen war of nerves with Western powers over which side should make what gesture first.

A U.S. intelligence report in December said Iran stopped actively trying to "weaponize" nuclear materials in 2003.

But it also said Iran has made technical progress towards refining uranium in amounts sufficient for a bomb in 2-7 years, if it decided to do so at sites not declared to inspectors.

ElBaradei's report is expected to say the IAEA is closer to wrapping up an inquiry into Iran's past nuclear activities.

But six world powers have drafted wider Security Council sanctions against Iran, saying clarifying old issues counts for less than Tehran's failure to open the books on its present program or shelve enrichment in return for trade benefits.

An underreported attack on a South African nuclear facility last month demonstrates the high risk of theft of nuclear materials by terrorists or criminals. Such a crime could have grave national security implications for the United States or any of the dozens of countries where nuclear materials are held in various states of security.

Shortly after midnight on Nov. 8, four armed men broke into the Pelindaba nuclear facility 18 miles west of Pretoria, a site where hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium are stored. According to the South African Nuclear Energy Corp., the state-owned entity that runs the Pelindaba facility, these four "technically sophisticated criminals" deactivated several layers of security, including a 10,000-volt electrical fence, suggesting insider knowledge of the system. Though their images were captured on closed-circuit television, they were not detected by security officers because nobody was monitoring the cameras at the time.

So, undetected, the four men spent 45 minutes inside one of South Africa's most heavily guarded "national key points" -- defined by the government as "any place or area that is so important that its loss, damage, disruption or immobilization may prejudice the Republic."

Eventually, the attackers broke into the emergency control center in the middle of the facility, stole a computer (which was ultimately left behind) and breached an electronically sealed control room. After a brief struggle, they shot Anton Gerber, an off-duty emergency services officer. Gerber later explained that he was hanging around because he believed (reasonably, in retrospect) that his fiancée -- a site supervisor -- was not safe at work. Although badly injured, Gerber triggered the alarm, setting off sirens and lights and alerting police stationed a few miles away.

Nevertheless, the four escaped, leaving the facility the same way they broke in.

Amazingly, at the same time those four men entered Pelindaba from its eastern perimeter, a separate group of intruders failed in an attempt to break in from the west. The timing suggests a coordinated attack against a facility that contains an estimated 25 bombs' worth of weapons-grade nuclear material. On Nov. 16, local police arrested three suspects, ranging in age from 17 to 28, in connection with this incident.

In response to the successful attack, the South African Nuclear Energy Corp. suspended six Pelindaba security personnel, including the general manager of security, and promised an "internal investigation which will cover culpability, negligence and improvements of Security Systems." It should be noted that Pelindaba's security was considered to have been upgraded after a break-in there two years ago (one individual was detained shortly after breaching the security fence).

It is still unclear why the two groups of intruders sought to break into this particular facility. More important, however, is that had the armed attackers succeeded in penetrating the site's highly enriched uranium storage vault, where the weapons-grade nuclear material is believed to be held, they could have carried away the ingredients for the world's first terrorist nuclear bomb.

As this incident shows, nuclear terrorism is a global issue, extending far beyond the familiar policy talking points of U.S. cooperation with Russia over its nuclear stockpiles, the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in the face of threats from Islamic extremists, and concerns that if Iran acquires nuclear capabilities it could provide a bomb to sympathetic terrorist organizations.

Indeed, the essential ingredients required for making a nuclear weapon exist in more than 40 countries, in facilities with differing levels of security. Unfortunately, there are still no binding global standards on how to secure nuclear weapons and weapons-grade nuclear material. In the absence of sustained political leadership from the world's nuclear powers to develop, agree to and implement effective nuclear security standards, armed attacks such as the one at Pelindaba could become commonplace.

Micah Zenko is a research associate in the project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The views expressed here are solely those of the author.