Yahoo News [here]
By SANG-HUN CHOE, Associated Press Writer
SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea on Thursday announced for the
first time that it has nuclear arms and rejected moves to restart
disarmament talks anytime soon, saying it needs the weapons as
protection against an increasingly hostile United States.
The communist state's pronouncement dramatically raised the
stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave
challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to
end North Korea's nuclear program through six-nation talks.
"We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the
Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and
stifle the (North)," the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a
statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
The claim could not be independently verified. North Korea
expelled the last U.N. nuclear monitors in late 2002 and has never
tested a nuclear bomb, although international officials have long
suspected it has one or two nuclear bombs and enough fuel for several
more.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said North Korea should
return to disarmament talks and avoid a path toward further
international isolation. She said the world "has given them a way out
and we hope they will take that way out."
"The North Koreans have been told by the president of the United
States that the United States has no intention of attacking or invading
North Korea," Rice told a news conference in Luxembourg. "There is a
path for the North Koreans that would put them in a more reasonable
relationship with the rest of the world."
Previously, North Korea had reportedly told U.S. negotiators in
private talks that it had nuclear weapons and might test one of them.
The North's U.N. envoy said last year that the country had "weaponized"
plutonium from its pool of 8,000 nuclear spent fuel rods. Those rods
contained enough plutonium for several bombs.
But Thursday's statement was North Korea's first public acknowledgment that it has nuclear weapons.
North Korea's "nuclear weapons will remain (a) nuclear deterrent
for self-defense under any circumstances," the ministry said. It said
Washington's alleged attempt to topple the North's regime "compels us
to take a measure to bolster its nuclear weapons arsenal in order to
protect the ideology, system, freedom and democracy chosen by its
people."
Since 2003, the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and
Russia have held three rounds of talks in Beijing aimed at persuading
the North to abandon nuclear weapons development in return for economic
and diplomatic rewards. No significant progress has been made.
A fourth round scheduled for last September was canceled when
North Korea refused to attend, citing what it called a "hostile" U.S.
policy.
South Korea (news - web sites) said Thursday the North's decision
to stay away from talks was "seriously regrettable." Foreign Ministry
spokesman Lee Kyu-hyung said "we again declare our stance that we will
never tolerate North Korea possessing nuclear weapons."
In recent weeks, hopes had risen that North Korea might return to
the six-nation talks, especially after Bush refrained from any direct
criticism of North Korea when he started his second term last month.
On Thursday, North Korea said it decided not to rejoin such talks
any time soon after studying Bush's inaugural and State of the Union
speeches and after Rice labeled North Korea one of the "outposts of
tyranny."
"We have wanted the six-party talks but we are compelled to
suspend our participation in the talks for an indefinite period till we
have recognized that there is justification for us to attend the talks
and there are ample conditions and atmosphere to expect positive
results from the talks," the ministry said.
Still, North Korea said it retained its "principled stand to
solve the issue through dialogue and negotiations and its ultimate goal
to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula remain unchanged."
Such a comment has widely been interpreted as North Korea's
negotiating tactic to get more economic and diplomatic concessions from
the United States before joining any crucial talks.
In Vienna, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency
said that "North Korea remains our single highest priority."
"We know they have raw materials to build nuclear weapons. We
also know that they have a delivery system and they've expressed their
intentions to have a nuclear arsenal," spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said.
In Japan, the top government spokesman said he wanted to confirm the North's intentions.
"They have used this sort of phrasing every so often. They didn't
say anything particularly new," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda
told a regular news conference.
For months, North Korea has lashed out at what it calls U.S.
attempts to demolish the regime of leader Kim Jong Il and meddle in the
human rights situation in the North. Washington has said it wants to
resolve the nuclear talks through dialogue.
In his Jan. 20 inaugural speech, Bush vowed that his new
administration would not shrink from "the great objective of ending
tyranny" around the globe.
In his State of the Union address earlier this month, Bush only
mentioned North Korea once, saying Washington was "working closely with
governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear
ambitions."
Bush's tone was in stark contrast to three years ago, when he
branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq (news
- web sites), raising hopes of a positive response from North Korea.
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials
accused North Korea of running a secret uranium-enrichment program in
violation of international treaties. Washington and its allies cut off
free fuel oil shipments for the impoverished country under a 1994 deal
with the United States.
North Korea retaliated by quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty in early 2003 and restarting its plutonium-based nuclear weapons
program, which had been frozen under the 1994 agreement.