party meeting. U.S. officials say Pyongyang has one or two nuclear weapons already plus material for another six bombs. "There are sometimes ups and downs (in this kind of bilateral negotiation) ... so what (Roh) said means that we need to be patient," Ban said. Seoul raised eyebrows when it recently disclosed that its scientists enriched a small amount of uranium in 2000 and separated plutonium in 1982 -- activities forbidden to South Korea as a signer of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons states. Ban spent the past few days assuring world leaders the work was "isolated laboratory-scale research activities that a few scientists conducted on their own" without government knowledge.
