North Korea said on Friday it was closer to a second way of making nuclear weapons, a move analysts saw as a new tactic to put pressure on the international community after a month of conciliatory gestures, Reuters reported. The chief U.S. envoy for the North, Stephen Bosworth, said the enrichment claim was "of concern". He was in Beijing on a trip to Asia to discuss ways to bring Pyongyang back to long-stalled negotiations on giving up its nuclear ambitions. "Experimental uranium enrichment has successfully been conducted to enter into completion phase," the North's KCNA news agency quoted its United Nations delegation as saying in a letter to the head of the U.N. Security Council (UNSC). The United States has long suspected the North of having a secret programme to enrich uranium for weapons. Experts have said it has not developed anything near a full-scale uranium programme while it has enough plutonium for six to eight bombs. The North said its latest steps were in response to tighter sanctions. -- SPA
