By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has said he believes North Korea possess several nuclear bombs, a report said Thursday.
``North Korea has built several bombs, and Iran seeks to join the nuclear club,'' Gates, who had been selected to continue his job under the Barack Obama administration, said in an article to be published in the January edition of policy journal Foreign Affairs, according to Yonhap news agency.
Defense officials and analysts here are paying keen attention to Gates' remarks because it was the first time that a defense leader either from the United States or South Korea had said North Korea succeeded in making nuclear bombs.
They also raised speculation that the U.S. government is moving to change its position on North Korea's nuclear status. Earlier this week, controversy erupted after it was found that an annual U.S. defense report categorized North Korea as one of the nuclear powers in Asia, alongside China, India, Pakistan and Russia.
The Pentagon said the description didn't reflect an official U.S. view of North Korea's nuclear capability.
``As a matter of policy, we do not recognize North Korea as a nuclear state,'' Stewart Upton, spokesman for the Department of Defense, said in a statement Tuesday. ``What was contained in a recent Joint Forces Command report does not reflect official U.S. government policy regarding the status of North Korea.''
Upton added that the report ``is not meant to be a statement of policy and specifically states on the second page that the report is speculative in nature and is only intended to serve as a starting point for discussions about the future security environment.''
Pyongyang, which conducted its first-ever nuclear test in October 2006, is believed to have enough plutonium to produce six to eight nuclear weapons, which was never officially confirmed.
Regional powers have been pushing the North to abandon its nuclear ambitions under a 2007 disarmament-for-aid pact. Chief nuclear envoys from the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia opened a fresh round of six-party talks in Beijing Monday to finalize the establishment of a protocol to verify the North's declaration of its nuclear programs and activities.