This is the first time that North Korea has publicly announced it does actually possess a nuclear weapon. Whether this is true or not is unknown as North Korea has stepped up it's sabre rattling recently. To publicly declare such is to draw enormous amounts of attention though, especially because they have also declared they are pulling out of multi-nation talks and don't plan to continue them.
This is not good.
Fox News
North Korea publicly acknowledged Thursday for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and said it won't return to six-nation talks aimed at getting it to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
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"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.
North Korea had reportedly told American negotiators during private talks that it possessed nuclear weapons and might test one of them. North Korea's U.N. envoy told The Associated Press last year the country had "weaponized" plutonium extracted from its pool of 8,000 nuclear spent fuel rods.
But Thursday's statement marked North Korea's first public admission that it has nuclear weapons through its usual means of making official declarations — statements carried on KCNA, its main news outlet to world.
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