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  Date / Time: 1/19/2009 7:00 PM UTC

  Tensions rise on Korean Peninsula
  

  Harrison, the scholar, presented North Korea's claims of weaponization on Saturday in Beijing after returning from North Korea's capital, Pyongyang.

  Harrison, a former journalist who is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy, has traveled several times to North Korea to meet with senior officials there.

  "They've raised the bar and said, 'We are a nuclear weapons state, and deal with us on that basis,' " Harrison said at a news conference in the St. Regis Hotel.

  Harrison acknowledged that North Korea could be bluffing to use the claim of having nuclear weapons as a negotiating tactic.

  North Korea had declared to the United States last year that it possessed 37 kilograms of plutonium; officials told Harrison on his trip that they had weaponized almost 31 kilograms.

  Despite that news, he said all the officials he met with seemed eager to open discussions with the incoming Obama administration. "All the statements about Obama were very helpful, very respectful," he said.

  Harrison said the North Korean officials had several proposals for Obama, including allowing North Korea to have access to long-term, low-interest credit to buy food.

  South Korea had no immediate reaction to Harrison's report.

  Earlier Saturday, North Korea had appeared to toughen its stance toward Washington, saying that reopening diplomatic ties would not be enough to persuade it to give up its nuclear weapons. It said it would maintain its "status as a nuclear weapons state" as long as there was a nuclear threat from the United States.

  "We can live without normalizing ties with the United States, but we cannot live without a nuclear deterrent," a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry told its official news agency, KCNA.

  In the past, the North had said it would not dismantle any weapons until the United States changed what it termed its "hostile attitude."

  In the spokesman's comments, and his similar statement last Tuesday, North Korea laid out its demands as it prepared for a new series of negotiations with Obama, who will be inaugurated on Tuesday.

  In its Tuesday statement, North Korea indicated that the removal of an American nuclear threat meant the removal of South Korea from the American nuclear umbrella, the introduction of a verification mechanism to ensure that no American atomic weapons are deployed in or pass through South Korea, and even simultaneous nuclear disarmament talks among "all nuclear states," including itself.

  Six-nation talks on ending North Korea's nuclear programs, which include the United States, stalled in the last months of the Bush administration as the United States and North Korea bickered over how much nuclear inspection the North should accept.

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