A top Russian atomic energy official on Thursday dismissed claims by North Korea that it possesses nuclear weapons, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. "Pyongyang has no possibilities to produce weapons-grade" material, the deputy head of Russia's Atomic Energy Agency, Sergey Antipov, told ITAR-Tass in an interview in Tokyo. The Russian official, who was in the Japanese capital for talks on the decommissioning of Russian nuclear submarines, did not rule out the possibility that the isolated Stalinist state had completed the process of producing plutonium from nuclear fuel rods. But he said this did not mean that North Korea had the means to develop an atomic bomb, saying the technology required for this "is far more complicated than for the peaceful use of atomic energy." Pyongyang pulled out of six-nation talks on its nuclear program on Feb. 10 and announced it had built nuclear weapons, a claim that has been impossible to verify. Three rounds of talks in Beijing involving the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have produced no solid progress toward a settlement.
