North Korea announced yesterday that its process of enriching uranium is nearly complete, giving it a new way to make nuclear bombs as the US and regional powers discuss how to bring Pyongyang back to disarmament talks.
The move raises concerns that North Korea may soon produce uranium-based bombs in addition to those made from plutonium.
The US, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea had been trying for years to persuade North Korea to dismantle its plutonium-based nuclear program, which experts say has yielded enough weaponized plutonium for at least half a dozen bombs, in exchange for much-needed aid.
PHOTO: AP
After hashing out a 2007 disarmament-for-aid deal, North Korea walked away from those talks earlier this year in anger over the rising international outcry over a rocket launch widely condemned as a disguised test of its long-range missile technology.
Uranium can be enriched in relatively inconspicuous, underground factories, and could provide North Korea with an easier way to build nuclear bombs, experts in the US and at South Korea’s Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control say.
Uranium-based bombs may also work without requiring test explosions, like the two carried out by North Korea in May and in 2006 for plutonium-based weapons.
Washington’s special envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, said any nuclear development in North Korea was a matter of concern.
“We confirm the necessity to maintain a coordinated position and the need for a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” he said in Beijing during an Asian trip to discuss North Korea with counterparts in China, South Korea and Japan.
The US had long suspected that the North also had a covert uranium enrichment program, which would give it a second source of nuclear material. North Korea for years denied the claim but revealed in June that it was prepared to start enriching uranium.
“Experimental uranium enrichment has successfully been conducted to enter into completion phase,” North Korea said in a letter to the UN Security Council carried yesterday by its official Korean Central News Agency.
Verifying North Korea’s claim on uranium enrichment would not be easy, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Won Tae-jae said, adding that it could be a negotiating tactic.
However, the announcement suggests the regime has made progress in research and development in its uranium program in a small pilot factory, said Lee Choon-geun of South Korea’s state-funded Science and Technology Policy Institute. Still, he said, it could take at least five years to build a uranium-based bomb.
North Korea also said yesterday it was continuing to weaponize plutonium. The 2007 deal had called for disabling its reactor.
The tough talk indicated North Korea’s impatience with the US as Washington continues to pursue sanctions against the North despite a series of overtures from it in recent weeks.
“We are prepared for both dialogue and sanctions,” the North said in the letter to the Security Council. If some permanent council members “wish to put sanctions first before dialogue, we would respond with bolstering our nuclear deterrence first before we meet them in a dialogue,” it said.
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