It has become an absolutely not possible option for North Korea to even think about giving up its nuclear weapons

TOKYO - North Korea confirmed yesterday that it could no longer "even think about giving up its nuclear weapons" following the UN Security Council's imposition of sanctions for its second nuclear test.

Declaring that it would meet sanctions with "retaliation," the government of Kim Jong Il vowed to "weaponize" all the plutonium it could be extracted from used fuel rods at its partially disabled Yongbyon nuclear plant.

It has also pledged to start enriching uranium to make more nuclear weapons. For the past seven years, North Korea has stubbornly denied US intelligence reports that it even had a uranium- enrichment program.

"It makes no difference to North Korea whether its nuclear status is recognized or not," the government said in a declaration by its official news agency. "It has become an absolutely not possible option for North Korea to even think about giving up its nuclear weapons."

The 15-member Security Council generally passed a resolution that imposes broad financial, trade, and military sanctions on North Korea, while also calling on states, for the first time, to seize banned weapons and technology from the North that are found aboard ships on the high seas.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the new UN penalties against North Korea provide the essential tools to help check the communist nation's continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.

"This was a remarkable statement on behalf of the world community that North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver those weapons through missiles is not going to be accepted by the neighbors as well as the better international community," was said by Clinton at a news conference in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

North Korea seemed to have interpreted the seizure resolution as a "blockade”, but at insistence of China and Russia, the North's traditional allies, the resolution does not authorize the use of military action to enforce any seizure that a North Korean vessel might resist, nor does it restrict shipments of food or other nonmilitary goods.

"An attempted blockade of any kind by the United States and its followers will be regarded as an act of war and met with a significant military response," said by the North Korea.

The aggressive language in the statement - which describes the council's action as "another ugly product of American-led international pressure" - is similar in tone to previous North Korean responses to UN sanctions.

But the North's announcement that it would process enriched uranium to make more weapons was an extraordinary public admission of active involvement in a program whose survival has been denied by Pyongyang since 2002, when it was first mentioned in a US intelligence report.

Uranium enrichment, which provides a different route for making nuclear weapons than plutonium, uses centrifuges to spin hot uranium gas into weapons-grade fuel.

Insisting that it had no uranium-enrichment program, the North Korean government took an American diplomat to a missile factory in 2007, where there was an aluminum tube that some experts had said that it could be used in uranium enrichment. North Korea permitted the diplomat to take home some samples.

Traces of enriched uranium were unpredictably discovered on those samples. Other traces were also found on the pages of reactor reports that North Korea turned over to the United States in 2008.

In recent years, US officials have suggested that North Korea has tried to enrich uranium, but it has not been extreme successful.