U.S. and North Korean envoys held their third one-on-one meeting Thursday amid talks aimed at convincing the North to give up nuclear weapons, after the two sides staked out tough positions with Pyongyang refusing to disarm until Washington normalizes relations. Meanwhile, a news report said North Korea hasn't assembled a working nuclear bomb but that the country has acquired all the components necessary to build one. The North claimed to have nuclear weapons in February. However, a diplomatic source close to the arms talks told Russia's Interfax news agency that Pyongyang informed China that the announcement meant the North was able to build a detonator for an atomic bomb. The source said the detonator was the most sophisticated element in weapons design that the North had been struggling to construct since the 1960s. North Korea has avoided spending to build up a nuclear stockpile, but the source told Interfax that the country would begin to do so in the face of unacceptable demands or a lack of security guarantees from the United States and its allies. At the talks, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan met Thursday morning for two hours but no details on what they discussed were immediately available, the U.S. Embassy said. --mor 1044 Local Time 0744 GMT
