New York: Pakistan may have conducted a nuclear weapons test in partnership with North Korea, a media report indicated today (Feb 27, 2004).

The revelations about international nuclear trading by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan have rekindled a debate in the American intelligence community over this unresolved but crucial strategic question from the last decade, it said.

Clues were detected after underground tests that Pakistan carried out in May 1998 when it proved to the world that its own efforts to build nuclear weapons had succeeded, the report said.

American experts are now examining whether North Korea might have given a small quantity of its precious plutonium forjoint tests.