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Friday, Dec. 27, 2002

According to the IAEA, North Korean technicians have moved about 400 fresh fuel rods out of storage and into a mothballed nuclear facility about 55 miles north of Pyongyang. Installing them would take at least a day's work and bringing the 5-megawatt Yongbyon reactor online several more weeks after that, nuclear experts said.

Earlier this month North Korea declared it would reactivate its nuclear facilities. It claimed it needed the energy sources after the United States suspended shipments of heavy oil to the famine-stricken country. Washington halted the energy aid after North Korea admitted in October it was pursuing a program to enrich uranium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons.

"Moving toward restarting its nuclear facilities without appropriate safeguards, and toward producing plutonium raises serious non-proliferation concerns and is tantamount to nuclear brinkmanship," said Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the Vienna-based IAEA.

The nuclear watchdog agency announced earlier this week that two inspectors remain at the Yongbyon site, but Pyongyang had disrupted safeguards equipment at three facilities there, including its reprocessing plant.

It is North Korea's abilities to reprocess fuel rods that has the world most worried. The Soviet-style reactors produce a form of nuclear waste that can be converted to weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear warheads. In fact, their design is "essentially similar" to those used by Britain in the 1950s to produce its own first plutonium-based warheads and nuclear electricity, according to the IAEA.

At only 5 megawatts, Yongbyon's reactor is more a small research facility than a full-blown production reactor, and would need to operate roughly a year before producing enough spent rods to reprocess into a nuclear bomb.

However, North Korea still has thousands of spent fuel rods in storage from its previous nuclear program. About eight to 10 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium is enough to make one nuclear bomb.

"The reprocessing facility at Yongbyon is irrelevant to the DPRK ability to produce electricity," said El Baradei. "The DPRK has no current legitimate peaceful use for plutonium, given the status of its nuclear fuel cycle."

Clinton's Catastrophe

Friction on the Korean peninsula rose to dangerous heights in 1993 when North Korea announced it would withdraw from the international Non-Proliferation Treaty and pursue its nuclear program. A year of tense negotiations eventually garnered the Clinton administration's 1994 Agreed Framework, in which Pyongyang claimed it would shut down and eventually dismantle its plutonium-generating reactors and accept international monitors in exchange for 500,000 tons of heavy oil annually to carry its energy needs in the short term.

Furthermore, in a victory heavily criticized by opposition groups from the framework's other signatory, the United States, North Korea received promises to build, at international expense, two 1,000-megawatt reactors of light-water design.

Those two modern reactors, which do not produce plutonium, are at least five years behind schedule. That, combined with the suspension of oil shipments, puts the United States in violation of the framework, according to the North Koreans.

Washington has dismissed such arguments. It says Pyongyang's enriched uranium program violates the spirit, if not the actual structure, of the 1994 framework.

On Thursday, state-run Radio Pyongyang defended the decision to restart its plutonium program as "a fair move intended to protect our sovereignty and our right to exist."

Russia's news agency reported from Pyongyang that electricity in several sectors of the North Korean capital is available only in the evening since the United States suspended oil shipments. Many residential houses and civil buildings lack heat and none have hot running water, Itar-Tass said.

Radio Pyongyang denied North Korea has aspirations for a weapons program: "The United States is trying to stir up public opinion internationally in an effort to make people believe that it is a sign of the development of nuclear weapons."

South Korea Finally Speaks Up

The United States is hardly alone in its concern, however. On Thursday South Korean President Kim Dae-jung repeated in no uncertain words that his country would not tolerate a nuclear weapons program by their northern neighbor.

"Despite the international community's efforts for a peaceful solution of the nuclear issue, North Korea moved to restart frozen nuclear facilities, further aggravating the situation," Kim was quoted by Yonhap news agency as saying.

South Korea's deputy foreign minister reportedly flew to Japan Thursday for a lunchtime tete-a-tete with his counterpart in Tokyo. At the same time Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yasuo Fukuda, called North Korea's transfer of the fuel rods "a provocation action," according to Kyodo News Service, and "we have expressed our regret."

The Russian Foreign Ministry, which was cautious in its condemnation of North Korea when news of its uranium program broke in mid-October, described the situation Thursday as "provoking concern in many countries." A U.S. State Department official told United Press International that its head, Colin Powell, had spoken with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Thursday and "is involved in outgoing discussions with other countries."

Both ruling and opposition parties in South Korea agreed to meet Friday to discuss the standoff within National Assembly committees on trade and defense, foreign affairs and also national unification.

"It is urgently needed to ask related ministers questions on the North Korean nuclear issue during the parliamentary plenary session on Dec. 30," said Rhee Q-taek of the opposition Grand National Party told Yonhap.

Copyright 2002 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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