A North Korean minister claimed Monday that Pyongyang had turned plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons to serve as a deterrent against a possible nuclear strike by the United States.

"We have already declared that we have reprocessed 8,000 wasted fuel rods and weaponized them," North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su-Hon told journalists in New York.

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

Reacting to the claim, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday it "just reinforces the need to eliminate nuclear weapons programs on the Korean Peninsula" through negotiations.

"Statements such as this, rhetoric such as this, just reinforces the need to reach an agreement which says this is no longer going to be a danger, and it's not going to happen again."

The United States has been involved in six-party talks with North Korea, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Japan to end Pyongyang's nuclear weapons drive.

Three rounds of talks have been held but North Korea has refused to attend the fourth, scheduled to be held this month, blaming both US "hostile" policy and secret nuclear experiments in South Korea.

"We've seen a whole series of claims from the North Koreans about "watch out, we're doing this; watch out we're doing that," Boucher said.

"That doesn't alter the fundamental situation," he said, adding that North Korea had "violated its commitments, continued to violate its commitments, is bragging about violating its commitments and its promises."

He said Pyongyang had also alienated its neighbors in northeast Asia.

The United States, Boucher said, had been "very clear and very consistent" over the nuclear issue and had wanted North Korea to return to the six-party talks so that a way could be found to end its nuclear weapons drive.

"We have a mechanism to reach that agreement to allow North Korea to end these programs, but also to gain the benefits of interaction with the outside world," he said.

The United States had proposed an aid-for-disarmament plan for North Korea at the previous round of talks but Pyongyang had rejected it, saying Washington was not sincere.

Boucher said he did not hold out any hope for North Korea to return to the negotiating table but would not rule it out altogether as the month had not ended.

"No, I'm not. I'm not holding out any hope, but I didn't quite want to call it quits until September 30th, just for the formality of the matter."

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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