"I think we are in a very bad situation and if the United States is looking for a settlement on its terms, it is not going to happen," said Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy.

Many are convinced that the hard-line Communist regime's public declaration Thursday that it had nuclear weapons and that it would boycott multilateral talks was to extract concessions from the United States.

In return for giving up its nuclear weapons, North Korea wants the United States to join the other four parties in six-party talks with Pyongyang -- Russia, Japan, South Korea and China -- in offering energy aid to the cash-starved state.

Harrison suggested some radical steps -- the United States resume oil supplies to North Korea suspended in December 2002 and move to normalize relations with the Stalinist state to woo it back to the talks.

"It's just a question of how seriously the United States takes North Korea's nuclear posture," he said.

"If the United States adopts a moderate posture, doesn't get excited by this and keeps urging them to meet and begin to show sometimes signs of flexibility, there are hopes of renewing the talks.

"But otherwise we are in for a long period of no six-party talks," Harrison said.

The reclusive state has attended three rounds of China-chaired inconclusive discussions on the nuclear stand-off and had shunned a fourth round originally scheduled for last September, complaining of "hostile" US policies.

In an immediate response to North Korea's announcement, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States and its allies could deal with any nuclear threat from Pyongyang but warned that the regime's arms ambitions would deepen its isolation.

She said Washington was consulting its allies on the next step.

Richard Bush, director of the center for Northeast Asian policy studies at The Brookings Institution, said North Korea's statement confirmed for the first time the long held US government belief about its nuclear weapons program.

"Previously, they would tell this to the United States but not the other people," he said.

Pyongyang's announcement underscores Washington's view that there are doubts about whether North Korea is serious about negotiating "in good faith" and creates "greater limits on the options" left for China, Russia and South Korea, Bush said.

To some extent, the three parties are seen to be sympathetic to North Korea and had been counting on the ambiguity of Pyongyang nuclear weapons' possession.

Bush said it was easier to pursue the six-party talks' goal of denuclearization such an ambiguity could be maintained "but now North Korea has removed that ambiguity."

He believed the United States would try to haul North Korea to the UN Security Council and tighten the economic noose on the famine-stricken state.

Now that North Korea has said it is nuclear-armed, South Korea and China may be more inclined to use the economic tool against it.

Russia and China, both members of the UN Security Council, may also not object to any statement by the powerful panel on the nuclear concerns gripping the Korean peninsula, Bush said.

Peter Brooks, the head of the Asian studies center at The Heritage Foundation, said the time had come for China, on which the Bush administration had been banking for a resolution to the nuclear dispute, to tighten the screws on North Korea.

He also said there was "nothing to panic," adding that North Korea's announcement was "to raise the tension level to look for food aid and other sort of inducements to be enticed to come to the table."

If North Korea really has a nuclear bomb, Brooks said, "it is pretty risky not to test it.

"It is politically costly to test but technologically risky for them to not test to show the weapon really works."

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