Defying warnings from Washington, North Korea's leader said on Sunday that his country was determined to expand its nuclear arsenal and rebuild its economy, calling its nuclear weapons "the nation's life," the New York Times reported.

Officials in the U.S. and South Korea are still hoping to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons sanctions and negotiations. Analysts have suggested that the North's recent belligerent language, including threats to attack the U.S. and the South with nuclear weapons, is a ploy to bring Washington back to the negotiation table.

The North's leader, Kim Jong-un has stated that his country must up its nuclear arsenal both "in quality and quantity, as long as the United States' nuclear threat continues." U.S. officials and independent experts say Pyongyang appears to have taken steps to conceal details about the nuclear weapon it tested last month, leading to speculation that the country has shifted to a bomb design that uses highly enriched uranium as the core.

From the Washington Post:

There are two paths to a nuclear weapon. The bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 used HEU as its core, and the one dropped three days later on Nagasaki was a plutonium device. North Korea has long possessed plutonium, but its enrichment of uranium is a more recent development. Iran has been concentrating on uranium enrichment, which it says is for civilian purposes.

Although North Korea and Iran have cooperated on missile technology, U.S. officials said there is no direct evidence of nuclear cooperation.

But despite warnings from Pyongyang that the Korean Peninsula was in a "state of war," a senior U.S. official told CBS News that the rhetoric for now is just all talk. 

SEE ALSO: North Korea Announces 'A State Of War,' Threatens To Close Factories

"North Korea is in a mindset of war, but North Korea is not going to war," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There is pot-banging and chest-thumping, but they have literature attracting tourists that explicitly says pay no attention to all that (public) talk about nuclear war or another kind of war."

North Korea is at odds over U.S.-South Korea military drills. The U.S. deployed F-22 Raptors to the South on Sunday to support the annual Foal Eagle training exercises that are part of the armistice that ended the armed hostilities in the Peninsula 1953.

The North also takes issue with new United Nations sanctions in response to last month's nuclear test. Two-thirds of the country's 24 million people face regular food shortages, according to the U.N.

 

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