N. Korea boasts of nuclear arms

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea boasted publicly for the first time Thursday that it has nuclear weapons and said it will stay away from disarmament talks, dramatically raising the stakes in the 2-year-old dispute. The Bush administration called on Pyongyang to give up its atomic aspirations so life can be better for its impoverished people.

North Korea's harshly worded pronouncement 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 disarmament 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 agency's report used the word "nukes" in its English-language dispatch.

Previously, U.S. negotiators said North Korean officials claimed in private talks that they had nuclear weapons and might test one. The North's U.N. envoy also said last year the country had "weaponized" plutonium from its pool of 8,000 nuclear spent fuel rods.

But Thursday's statement was the first claim directly from North Korea's state media that it has a nuclear weapon, confirming the widely held beliefs of international experts that the country has one or two atomic bombs. North Korea is not known to have performed any nuclear tests, and it kicked out U.N. inspectors in 2002, so there is no way to verify its claims.

The United States and South Korea, the North's main rivals, played down the revelation and urged the North to return to the six-nation talks that began in 2003 and also include China, Japan and Russia. Analysts suggested the move by North Korea may be a negotiating tactic aimed at getting more compensation in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons program.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said North Korea should return to negotiations.

"The world has given them a way out and we hope they will take that way out," she said, wrapping up a trip to Europe. "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.

"The message is clear: Give up these aspirations for nuclear weapons and you know life can be different," Rice said, adding that it was the same message Libya understood in renouncing its nuclear ambitions.

The nuclear crisis began in 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 made under the condition that North Korea halt nuclear weapons development.

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.

The CIA has estimated that with a highly enriched uranium weapons program and the use of sophisticated high-speed centrifuges, North Korea could be making more. Some analysts and observers have put the estimate at six to eight.