A top North Korean official has told US legislators that the communist state possessed nuclear weapons, Radio Free Asia reported yesterday.
North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan said the country was a nuclear weapons state but its nuclear arsenal was defensive in nature and Pyongyang did not intend to possess it forever, Radio Free Asia quoted US Republican Mr Curt Weldon as saying.
Mr Weldon led a six-member congressional delegation to North Korea last week and met with its senior officials.
North Korea aimed to denuclearise itself and it was willing to move toward that end in a transparent manner, Weldon quoted the North's Foreign Minister Mr Paek Nam-sun as saying.
"The president of the country said that he foresaw the day when America and North Korea would be friends," Mr Weldon was quoted as telling a forum in Washington last week about his meeting with the North's number-two official and president of its assembly, Kim Yong-nam.
Mr Weldon has said since his return he had not met with the North's leader Kim Jong-il, who rules the country as chairman of its defence commission. North Korea is believed to possess one or two nuclear weapons and possibly more than eight.
It has boasted to have transformed spent plutonium from reactors into materials for nuclear weapons, but has never formally declared to possess nuclear weapons.