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North Korean officials say they have "weaponised" around 30kg of plutonium - enough to make four or five warheads - a United States expert reported yesterday as he returned from talks in Pyongyang.
Selig Harrison said senior officials warned that North Korea was now a nuclear weapons state and would not commit itself on when it would give them up. The claims came as the North Korean military announced an "all-out confrontational posture" against the South on TV yesterday.
Relations have been increasingly hostile since the South Korea president, Lee Myung-bak, took office last year, pledging to get tough on Pyongyang.
Bush Administration officials had predicted North Korea might try to catch the US off-guard as the new administration took charge and the regime has sent mixed signals recently.
While it sounded increasingly hawkish in some ways, Harrison said, the Foreign Minister, Pak Ui Chun, and others had stressed their hopes for friendly relations with the US once Barack Obama took office.
Harrison, director of the Asia programme at the Washington-based Centre for International Policy, described North Korea's diplomatic strategy as "a non-stop bargaining and probing process" in which they frequently changed tack - but said they had raised the bar with their announcement.
North Korea is believed to have conducted a nuclear test in 2006 and 30.8kg of non-weapons grade plutonium were declared last year.
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