North Korea said Friday it has entered the final phase of uranium enrichment for nuclear weapons and is also building more bombs with spent reactor fuel rods.
"Experimental uranium enrichment has successfully been conducted to enter into completion phase," the communist state's official Korean Central News Agency said in an English-language report.
"Reprocessing of spent fuel rods is at its final phase and extracted plutonium is being weaponised," the agency quoted its permanent representative to the United Nations as saying.
"We are prepared for both dialogue and sanctions," the representative was quoted as saying in a letter Thursday to the president of the UN Security Council.
The North for years denied it was operating a secret enriched uranium bomb-making programme in addition to its admitted plutonium-based operation.
But after the United Nations imposed tougher sanctions in June following its May 25 nuclear test, the North vowed to start such a programme and to extract plutonium from fuel rods.
