Pyongyang seek nuclear arms to arrest faltering economy

COMMUNIST North Korea yesterday said it wanted nuclear weapons so it could cut its huge conventional forces and divert funds into an economy foreign analysts say is close to collapse.

North Korea’s most explicit public acknowledgement to date that it was seeking to build nuclear weapons also marked the first time

Pyongyang had linked its atomic programme to cutting its conventional military and saving money.

North Korea has one of the largest armed forces in the world with 1.1 million troops, many of them forward-deployed near the Demilitarised Zone that bisects the Korean peninsula.

In a Korean-language commentary, the North’s official KCNA news agency said, if the United States did not give up what it described as its hostile policy, Pyongyang would have no choice but to have a nuclear deterrent.

“We are not trying to possess a nuclear deterrent in order to blackmail others but we are trying to reduce conventional weapons and divert our human and monetary resources to economic development and improve the living standards of the people,” KCNA said.

A commentary on KCNA clearly has high-level approval.

The United States’ CIA has said the North processed enough plutonium for one or two atomic bombs during a nuclear programme that was frozen in 1994.

Last year, the North restarted a research reactor capable of producing plutonium.

The KCNA report was issued as South Korean defence minister Cho Young-kil told parliament he planned to raise 2004 military spending to prepare for a greater defence burden falling on Seoul under a sweeping overhaul of US forces in the South.

Yu Suk-ryul, a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul, said the KCNA commentary seemed intended to play up the North’s economic difficulties and underscore its desire for bilateral talks with the US about its nuclear ambitions.