North Korea appears to have launched a uranium enrichment program as a new way of building atomic bombs soon after its 1994 deal with the US to dismantle its existing plutonium nuclear weapons program, South Korea said yesterday.
South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said in an interview with Yonhap news agency published yesterday that the North appears to have launched its uranium enrichment program right after the 1994 agreement, or by 1996 at the latest.
Pyongyang last year said it had a uranium enrichment program, but did not say when it had started it.
Yu, who has expressed doubts in the past that North Korea will give up its nuclear program, did not give specific evidence as is common practice concerning intelligence matters. Yu’s ministry confirmed his remarks.
If North Korea did launch their uranium enrichment program so soon after the 1994 deal with the US it would underline the deceptive nature of the communist regime that has brandished nuclear threats to extract aid and concessions. It would also raise doubts whether Pyongyang has any intention to give up atomic ambitions.
“It appears the North started the uranium enrichment program right after the 1994 agreement or at least in 1996,” Yu told Yonhap.
Atomic bombs can be made with highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
The 1994 pact between Pyongyang and Washington had defused an earlier nuclear crisis over Pyongyang’s plutonium-based bomb program.
Under that accord, the North agreed to freeze and ultimately dismantle its nuclear reactor in exchange for economic aid and diplomatic recognition.
The agreement fell apart in 2002 when the US accused the North of running a secret uranium enrichment program, touching off the latest nuclear standoff.
North Korea had long rejected the uranium allegations. But in an attempt to further escalate tensions after its second-ever nuclear test in May last year, the regime claimed that it has such a program and succeeded in experimental uranium enrichment.
It has not said when that program started, and it was unclear whether Pyongyang would respond to Yu’s allegation about the timing.
Yu said it is unclear how advanced that program is, how much uranium the North has enriched and how much of that has been turned into weapons.
Besides the uranium program, North Korea is also believed to have enough plutonium for at least half a dozen bombs.
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
HIGH TENSIONS: Local media reported that police had fired into the air to try to disperse an angry crowd at the garbage dump, while investigators called for calm and cooperation A total of eight bodies, all female, have been recovered so far from a garbage dump near Nairobi, Kenya’s acting police chief said yesterday, after authorities a day earlier confirmed they had found more bags filled with dismembered female body parts, the latest macabre discovery that has horrified and angered the country. Detectives have been scouring the site in the Mukuru area of Nairobi since the mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday in sacks floating in a sea of garbage. On Saturday, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said that five bags had been retrieved from
A World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with more than 100 victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s black community, the mayor said on Friday. Using DNA from descendants of his brothers, the remains of C.L. Daniel from Georgia were identified by Intermountain Forensics, said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum and officials from the lab. The man was in his 20s when he was killed. “This is one family who gets to give a member of their family that they lost a proper burial, after not knowing where they were for over a century,”