North Korea has sown confusion with a weekend comment that seems to confirm for the first time the reclusive communist state has nuclear weapons.
But analysts in Japan and South Korea, two neighbors who are working closely with the US to pressure the North to scrap its nuclear ambitions, said yesterday it looked more like a linguistic mix-up.
Just one Korean syllable separates North Korea's stock assertion of its right to possess nuclear arms from a declaration it has such weapons -- a development that would complicate allied efforts to pre-empt a new nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.
The world's last Cold War flashpoint went from reconciliation to crisis prevention last month, when US officials said North Korea had admitted pursuing a nuclear arms development program, violating a landmark 1994 agreement with Washington.
The North has demanded the US sign a non-aggression pact to defuse the row. Washington and its allies decided last week to stop shipments of vital fuel oil aid to penalize Pyongyang.
On Sunday, Pyongyang Radio said the country "has come to have nuclear and other strong military weapons to deal with increased nuclear threats by the US imperialists," according to Seoul's Yonhap news agency, which monitors North Korean broadcasts.
That statement appeared to go further than Pyongyang's previous remarks that it was "entitled to have nuclear weapons" in the face of threats from a US government that has branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq.
South Korean Unification Ministry official Bae Taek-hue said the ministry had not completed a final analysis of the broadcast text, "but the report appears wrong in its wording."
Yonhap said on Sunday the statement may have been deliberately misleading or was a rare mistake by the North Korean state broadcaster. Yesterday it quoted a Unification Ministry official as saying the announcer's accent had thrown Southern listeners off.
At issue is one syllable which in the announcer's Northern accent turned "is entitled to have" (kajige tui-o-itta) into "has come to have" (kajige tui-otta), the official said.
The ethnically homogeneous 48 million South Koreans and 22 million North Koreans share a common language but there are substantial differences in pronunciation across the long peninsula, which is slightly smaller than Britain.
An analyst at Radio Press, a Tokyo-based agency which monitors North Korean media, said it also had difficulty analyzing the statement. The agency concluded the statement did not depart from Pyongyang's assertion on Oct. 25 it had the right to possess nuclear weapons, the analyst said.
In 1994, at the height of an earlier North Korean nuclear crisis that was defused by the Agreed Framework, the US CIA made public an estimate that North Korea had possibly already produced one or two nuclear weapons.
Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the North promised to freeze its nuclear weapons program in return for fuel oil, paid for by Washington, and two light-water reactors that cannot easily be converted to produce atomic weapons material.
North Korea's ruling party newspaper, in a report with similar content to the Pyongyang Radio broadcast, said the US was the one who had broken the 1994 nuclear pact but was trying to deceive the world by pinning the blame on the North.
"The lie is aimed to tarnish the international prestige and authority of the DPRK and isolate the DPRK on a worldwide scale," said the Rodong Sinmun. DPRK stands for the state's official title, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
In an apparent bid to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, the newspaper accused the US yesterday of committing a "shameless burglary act" by trying to slow down mine-clearing work to allow restored North-South railway links.
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