| Officials in South Korea continued Friday to try to assure the world that the nation had no nuclear arms program, with its top nuclear researcher saying government scientists had enriched a speck of uranium "smaller than a sesame seed" merely "to satisfy their curiosity." "Some misunderstood this experiment as a step to build nuclear weapons, but atomic energy experts would probably laugh at such claims," Chang In Soon, director of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, the government laboratory where the experiment took place, told the Seoul newspaper JoongAng Ilbo. Acknowledging that his institute was not authorized to enrich uranium, he said the scientists performed the work using equipment that had been assembled for a different experiment. |