North Korea Says It Has ‘Weaponized’ Plutonium

North Korea Says It Has ‘Weaponized’ Plutonium, by Choe Sang-Hun
TNYT, January 18, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea — The North Korean military declared an “all-out confrontational posture” against South Korea on Saturday as an American scholar said he had been told by North Korean officials that the North had “weaponized” 30.8 kilograms of plutonium, enough for four to six nuclear bombs.

That claim would confirm American intelligence estimates, which suggest that the North has harvested the fuel for six or more bombs.

South Korea ordered its military to heighten vigilance along the heavily fortified border with North Korea, said a spokesman of the South Korean military joint chiefs of staff.

North Korea’s saber-rattling rhetoric against the South has increased in intensity since President Lee Myung-bak came to office in Seoul a year ago, vowing to take a tougher stance on North Korea, reversing 10 years of his liberal predecessors’ efforts to engage the North with economic aid. But what made the threat on Saturday unusual — and more worrisome to some South Korean analysts — was the way it was delivered: in a statement read on North Korean television by a uniformed spokesman for the North Korean military joint chiefs of staff.

“Strong military measures will follow from our revolutionary armed force,” the spokesman, a colonel, said, according to Yonhap, South Korea’s national news agency, which monitors North Korean broadcasts.

Usually the North Korean government issues written statements that are delivered by North Korean media; sometimes the statements are read by press officers, not by a uniformed member of the military.

The spokesman he warned of a clash along a disputed western sea border between the Koreas. The two navies fought skirmishes there in 1999 and 2002. It is always difficult to decipher the messages that North Korea’s reclusive government is trying to send with its often bombastic missives. In times of crucial bargaining, North Korea often tries to drive a wedge between Washington and South Korea to sow discord between the allies, and raises the stakes by increasing demands and issuing dire threats.

With President-elect Barack Obama about to take office in the United States and negotiations over the North’s nuclear program expected to resume, it is possible that the North is merely setting up its negotiating position. But analysts said it could also be an indication that North Korea was intending to hold on to its arms despite an agreement it signed with five countries, including the United States, in 2005, in which it committed to eventually giving up those weapons. The exact conditions under which it would do so were unclear.

Questions over the health of the country’s quixotic leader, Kim Jong-il, also complicate any attempts to understand the country, where few Westerners have access. In August, there were reports that Mr. Kim suffered a stroke, and since then rumors have swirled about who might succeed him.

The news about the possible weaponization of North Korea’s stores of plutonium were delivered Saturday by the American scholar, Selig S. Harrison, the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy, who was in Beijing after returning from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Mr. Harrison, said that when pressed, the North Korean officials did not explicitly say what “weaponization” of the plutonium meant, but that the implication was that North Korea had created nuclear bombs with the plutonium.

Mr. Harrison, a former journalist, often travels to North Korea to meet with senior officials there.

“They’ve raised the bar and said, ‘We are a nuclear weapons state and deal with us on that basis,’ ” said Mr. Harrison at a news conference in the St. Regis Hotel in Beijing.

Mr. Harrison acknowledged that North Korea could be bluffing in order to use the claim of having nuclear weapons as a negotiating tactic.

He added that all the officials he met with seemed eager to open discussions with the incoming Obama administration. “All the statements about Obama were very helpful, very respectful,” he said.

Thirty kilograms of plutonium, about 66 pounds, which would account for most of the 37 kilograms North Korea declared that it possessed to the United States last year, is enough for it to make four to six bombs, according to nuclear experts.

South Korea had no immediate reaction to Mr. Harrison’s report.

Earlier Saturday, North Korea also toughened its stance toward Washington, saying that reopening diplomatic ties would not be enough to persuade it to give up its nuclear weapons. It said it would maintain its “status as a nuclear weapons state” as long as there was a nuclear threat from the United States.

“We can live without normalizing ties with the United States, but we cannot live without a nuclear deterrent,” a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry told its official news agency, KCNA.

In the past, the North had said it would not dismantle the weapons until the United States changed what it termed its “hostile attitude.”

In the spokesman’s comments, and his similar statement last Tuesday, North Korea laid out its demands as it prepared for a new series of negotiations with Mr. Obama, who will be inaugurated on Tuesday.

Its stance posed the hard question to the new Obama administration of what it would take to remove North Korea’s nuclear weapons assets.

In its Tuesday statement, North Korea indicated that the removal of an American nuclear threat meant the removal of South Korea from the American nuclear umbrella, the introduction of a verification mechanism to ensure that no American atomic weapons are deployed in or pass through South Korea, and even simultaneous nuclear disarmament talks among “all nuclear states,” including itself.

Six-nation talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear programs, which include the United States, stalled in the last months of the Bush administration as the United States and North Korea bickered over how much nuclear inspection the North should accept.

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing.