For the first time, the communist government in North Korea has publicly claimed it has nuclear weapons.

There is no positive implication in that revelation for regional security in that part of Asia.

An excerpt:

North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks any time soon, saying it needs the armaments as protection against an increasingly hostile United States.

The communist state's pronouncement dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea's nuclear program through six-nation talks.

``We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North),'' the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Previously, North Korea reportedly told U.S. negotiators in private talks that it had nuclear weapons and might test one of them. Its U.N. envoy told The Associated Press last year that the country had ``weaponized'' plutonium from its pool of 8,000 nuclear spent fuel rods.

But Thursday's statement was North Korea's first public acknowledgment that it has nuclear weapons. North Korea makes all important statements in the name of its Foreign Ministry spokesman and spreads them through KCNA, the isolated state's main news outlet.