North Korea said on Saturday it may keep its nuclear weapons even after normalising relations with the United States, staking out a tough position three days before President-elect Barack Obama takes office."Even if the DPRK (North Korea)-US diplomatic relations become normalised, our status as a nuclear-armed state will never change as long as the US nuclear threat to us remains, even to the slightest degree," a foreign ministry spokesman said.
The spokesman, quoted by the official Korean Central News Agency, said it was a "miscalculation" for the US to consider normalised ties a reward for the communist state abandoning nuclear weapons.
"What we earnestly desire is not the normalisation of DPRK-US ties but the strengthening of nuclear deterrence in every possible way," the spokesman added. "We have made nuclear weapons (not) in order... to seek the normalisation of ties with the US or economic assistance but to protect us from US nuclear threats.
"We can live without the normalisation of ties with the US but we cannot survive without the nuclear deterrence."