NORTH KOREA/THE US: The acknowledgement by North Korea that it has been conducting a nuclear weapons programme for some years has prompted the US administration to discuss shutting down a programme to provide it with 500,000 tonnes of heating oil annually.
The startling admission by Pyongyang has also raised questions about the US preparations for war against Iraq, which has not yet developed nuclear weapons, rather than North Korea, branded by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil".
The US aid was designed to help North Korea to meet its energy needs before the planned construction of two light water nuclear reactors, with financing mostly by South Korea and Japan.
The reactors were promised in a 1994 agreement to bring about a nuclear weapons-free North Korea.
Since the agreement, Pyongyang has denied that it is seeking to manufacture nuclear weapons. However on October 4th, North Korean officials told the US Assistant Secretary of State, Mr James Kelly, at a meeting in Pyongyang that they had a nuclear weapons programme.
The news was withheld by the administration until it was leaked on Wednesday. Officials said they did not want to complicate the debate in the US Congress over Iraq. The Secretary of Defence, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, said on Thursday that he believed North Korea had "a small number of nuclear weapons" and that the CIA thought it had one or two.
Responding to criticisms that the US was inconsistent in its treatment of North Korea and Iraq, the National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, said: "Effective international pressure may have an effect on North Korea . . . We've tried everything with Saddam Hussein, nothing has worked."
The US has put pressure on North Korea for a decade not to pursue the nuclear option but those efforts do not appear to have worked either. The admission by North Korean officials came after the Bush administration resumed talks with President Kim Jong-Il's regime in Pyongyang and presented evidence of North Korean nuclear research.
When asked whether the US might use military force, the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said: "We're not planning anything of that nature right now."
North Korea has a 1.7 million-strong army facing 37,00 US troops and could launch strikes against Seoul or Tokyo in the event of a war, with huge casualties and destruction on both sides.
On the other hand, the US fully expects to conquer Iraq with sophisticated weaponry and minimum US casualties.
US officials said they passed the information to China, which they described as stunned by the news, and will send emissaries to the region to discuss the consequences.
North Korea may have released the news as a tactic to get more aid for its food-starved country. The New York Times said US intelligence officials had concluded that Pakistan was a major supplier of equipment North Korea needed to restart its nuclear programme.
In return, North Korea supplied Pakistan with missiles to counter India's nuclear arsenal, the report said. Pakistan has strongly denied the report.