Moscow, March 10, SPA -- A top Russian atomic energy official onThursday dismissed claims by North Korea that it possessesnuclear 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 fortalks on the decommissioning of Russian nuclear submarines,did not rule out the possibility that the isolatedStalinist state had completed the process of producingplutonium from nuclear fuel rods. But he said this did not mean that North Korea had themeans to develop an atomic bomb, saying the technologyrequired for this "is far more complicated than for thepeaceful use of atomic energy." Pyongyang pulled out of six-nation talks on its nuclearprogram on Feb. 10 and announced it had built nuclearweapons, a claim that has been impossible to verify. Three rounds of talks in Beijing involving the UnitedStates, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia haveproduced no solid progress toward a settlement.--SPA1450 Local Time 1150 GMT www.spa.gov.sa/245610