Originally posted here by Terr
Uhm... I'd like to point out that this was said by US officials, NOT North Korean ones. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't have reasons for getting it released in some manner, but I've heard the story several times today with the implicit assumption that it was in an official public statement FROM N. Korea, which puts a very different spin on things.
That's not the way I've heard it, Terr. Here's what I've found on how the news was broken:

Quoted from here.

North Korea acknowledged to U.S. officials earlier this month that it has a secret and active nuclear weapons program that began after the 1994 agreement, the White House said Wednesday.

The official said the revelation came in a meeting in Pyongyang between Kelly and a top North Korean official, Kang Suk Ju, described as the equivalent of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's right-hand man.

A senior Bush administration official said Kelly told Kang the United States knows North Korea has a secret uranium-based nuclear weapons program and that it has enough plutonium for at least two nuclear weapons.

The North Korean official then shocked Kelly when he said "something to the effect of, 'Your president called us a member of the axis of evil ... Your troops are deployed on the Korean Peninsula ... Of course, we have a nuclear program,'" according to the senior source who has been briefed on the meeting.
Am I just reading this article wrong? It sounds to me like the admission was a sort of a self-preservation defense argument, and it doesn't sound like it was prodded by anything specific.