North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su-Hon told a small group of journalists in New York Monday that 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods had been turned into weapons, according to footage aired on YTN cable news television.

"The chances are high for his remarks to be part of a highly-calculated propaganda offensive," an unnamed South Korean government official was quoted by YTN as saying. "But we are trying to verify what he really meant."

Another unnamed Seoul official told Yonhap news agency: "North Korea has been insisting on a nuclear deterrent against what it claims to be a hostile US policy toward its regime. The comment this time is nothing new from its previous stance that it will possess a nuclear deterrent."

He said "it is hard to believe the North has finished reprocessing all the fuel rods" given its limited time and technology.

Official comment was not immediately available during an extended national holiday.

"We have already declared that we have reprocessed 8,000 wasted fuel rods and weaponized them," Choe told the journalists, according to the YTN footage.

Choe's remarks were unprecedentedly explicit. Pyongyang has previously used vague terms such as "nuclear deterrent" to refer to its capability.

The North Korean vice foreign minister, however, failed to specify the number or types of weapons allegedly made.

Intelligence authorities in Seoul and Washington say North Korea's reprocessing of 8,000 spent fuel rods could produce enough plutonium to make six to eight nuclear warheads.

North Korea had previously been believed to possess one or two rudimentary nuclear bombs.

In a UN General Assembly speech in New York on Monday, Choe said his communist homeland "is left with no other option but to possess a nuclear deterrent" against possible US attacks.

He also reaffirmed that North Korea would not return for a fourth round of six-nation talks on its nuclear program, blaming both US "hostile" policy and secret nuclear experiments in South Korea.

The standoff over North Korea's nuclear ambitions flared in October 2002 when Washington accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium in violation of a 1994 agreement.

Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program but has restarted its plutonium program.

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