A genuine threat:

North Korea today publicly acknowledged for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and rejected recent attempts to restart disarmament talks soon. In a statement from the foreign ministry, Pyongyang said it needed the weapons as protection against an increasingly hostile United States. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, reacted by saying North Korea should not worry about any US plans for invasion. The North Korean statement, which was carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, said: "We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defence to cope with the Bush administration's evermore undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the [North]." North Korea had reportedly already told the US in private that it had nuclear weapons and that it might test one of them. It is thought North Korea may have one or two nuclear weapons but is building its capacity to make more. Analysts said today's announcement may be a negotiating gambit aimed at improving North Korea's position in the vexed six-nation talks about its nuclear intentions that started two years ago. The ministry statement said that North Korea retained its "principled stand to solve the issue through dialogue and negotiations and its ultimate goal to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula remain unchanged".