The United States says it will not tolerate North Korea's status as a nuclear state.

A U.S. State Department official said Tuesday that the underlying position of the United States is that North Korea must not possess atomic weapons and that Washington cannot accept the communist regime's status as a nuclear state.

The official said if North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, it must abandon them and if it doesn't hold the weapons, it must then give up efforts to acquire them.

The official pointed out as reasons why the North should not possess nuclear arms the communist regime's obligation to fulfill its original obligations to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the South-North declaration on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the 1994 Basic Agreement between the North and the United States.