US team saw potential nuke component in North Korea

"One official said it appeared that the delegation had been shown what the North Koreans described as recently reprocessed plutonium," the daily said.

"North Korean officials told the experts the material has not been placed in a nuclear device and that it was prepared to 'freeze' it to resolve the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions," it said.

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Pyongyang's official media said Saturday that North Korea showed its "nuclear deterrent force" to US scientists and congressional officials who visited the North's main nuclear complex at Yongbyon.

"As is known, the United States compelled us to make a nuclear deterrent force, which we displayed to (Lewis) and his group," the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.

The North Korean report did not say exactly what the delegation was shown.

Delegation members questioned by reporters as they arrived in Beijing Saturday also kept mum, saying they wanted first to inform the US government about the trip.

Stanford University scholar John Lewis, head of the US delegation, confirmed that the group had visited Yongbyon, becoming the first outsiders to go there since UN inspectors were expelled a year ago.

Delegation member Siegfried Hecker, the former head of Los Alamos National Laboratory, plans to testify about the visit before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 20, the Post said.