N Korea demands talks with US to defuse row

Han Sung Ryol, a senior diplomat at North Korea's UN delegation in New York, was the first North Korean official to speak to outside news media since Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry defied the United States and its allies by declaring Thursday that it has nuclear weapons, its first public announcement that it has weapons.

North Korea said the weapons are a deterrent against a US invasion and that it doesn't intend to join six-nation disarmament talks any time soon.

"We will return to the six-nation talks when we see a reason to do so and the conditions are ripe," Han told Seoul's Hankyoreh newspaper in a Thursday interview in New York. "If the United States moves to have direct dialogue with us, we can take that as a signal that the United States is changing its hostile policy toward us."

Han's suggestion came as the two-year-old standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons programs plummeted to a new low with Pyongyang's statement Thursday.

It's a long-running North Korean strategy to try to engage the United States in bilateral talks, believing that such meetings would boost the isolated country's international status and help it win bigger concessions. In the current six-nation talks, North Korea has increasingly found itself surrounded by countries, including its allies China and Russia, who are critical of its nuclear ambitions.