SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea said Wednesday that it has built nuclear weapons small enough to be carried by missiles, even as a senior U.S. general questioned the country's recent claim that it successfully had tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile.
"It is long since the DPRK's nuclear striking means have entered the stage of producing smaller nukes and diversifying them," the National Defense Commission said in a statement, using the initials of North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The statement was carried by the official news agency KCNA.
"The DPRK has reached the stage of ensuring the highest precision and intelligence and best accuracy of not only medium- and short-range rockets, but long-range ones," the agency said.
Officials and analysts in Washington and Seoul remain uncertain and even divided over how close North Korea has come to acquiring a nuclear weapon small enough to be put on a missile, as well as its ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile. But their concern has grown since North Korea placed a satellite into orbit in December 2012, successfully demonstrating rocket technology needed for a long-range missile.
In February 2013, North Korea claimed it had conducted its third underground nuclear test with "a smaller and lighter A-bomb."
A month later, the North's main government newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, quoted a North Korean general as saying that the country's "intercontinental ballistic missiles and other missiles are on a standby, loaded with lighter, smaller and diversified nuclear warheads."
Adm. William Gortney, the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said last month that U.S. intelligence officials believe North Korea had the ability to put a nuclear weapon on its KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile "and shoot it at the homeland," although he said North Korea had yet to run a flight test of the missile.
North Korea's statement Wednesday came in response to international criticism of a ballistic missile test Pyongyang said it conducted May 8. United Nations resolutions prohibit North Korea from testing such a missile.
North Korea said the May 8 test involved launching a strategic missile from a submarine. But some analysts have questioned the claim, saying that some of the photographs that North Korea released may have been altered and that the test launch may have been conducted from a submerged barge.
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Tuesday, Adm. James Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced similar skepticism.
"They have not gotten as far as their clever video editors and spinmeisters would have us believe," Winnefeld said. "They are many years away from developing this capability. But if they are eventually able to do so, it will present a hard-to-detect danger for Japan and South Korea, as well as our service members stationed in the region."
Also Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said North Korea had canceled an invitation for him to visit a factory park that is the last major cooperation project between the rival Koreas.
Ban had planned to go today to the Kaesong industrial park just north of the heavily fortified Korean border to help improve ties between North and South Korea, which remain in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, would have been the first U.N. chief to visit the factory park, which opened in 2004, and the first U.N. leader to visit North Korea since Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1993.
North Korea gave no reason when it told the U.N. of its decision to cancel his trip, Ban said at a forum in Seoul.
"This decision by Pyongyang is deeply regrettable," said Ban, adding that he will spare no effort to encourage North Korea to work with the international community for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and beyond.
Lim Byeong Cheol, a spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry, expressed regret over the North's decision, saying the country must accept offers for dialogue and cooperation by the U.N. and other members of the international community instead of isolating itself.
Information for this article was contributed by Choe Sang-hun of The New York Times and by Hyung-Jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/21/2015