North Korea Says It Will Start Enriching Uranium - Also Will Weaponize All the Plutonium It Can Find

North Korea Says It Will Start Enriching Uranium. By Blaine Harden
Weapons Move Is 'Retaliation' for Sanctions
Washingt, Sunday, June 14, 2009

TOKYO, June 13 -- North Korea adamantly denied for seven years that it had a program for making nuclear weapons from enriched uranium.

But on Saturday, a few hours after the U.N. Security Council slapped it with tough new sanctions for detonating a second nuclear device, the government of Kim Jong Il changed its tune, vowing that it would start enriching uranium to make more nuclear weapons.

Declaring that it would meet sanctions with "retaliation," North Korea also pledged to "weaponize" all the plutonium it could extract from used fuel rods at its Yongbyon nuclear plant, which was partially disabled last year as part of the North's agreement to win food, fuel and diplomatic concessions in return for a promise to end its nuclear program.

That agreement collapsed in April, when North Korea -- fuming about Security Council condemnation of its March launch of a long-range missile -- kicked U.N. weapons inspectors out of the country and began work to restart its plutonium factory. It tested a second bomb on May 25, and South Korean officials have said more missile launches and a third nuclear test are possible in the near future.

"It makes no difference to North Korea whether its nuclear status is recognized or not," the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang said in a statement carried by the state news agency. "It has become an absolutely impossible option for North Korea to even think about giving up its nuclear weapons."

The 15-member Security Council unanimously passed a resolution Friday that imposes broad financial, trade and military sanctions on North Korea, while also calling on states, for the first time, to seize banned weapons and technology from the North that are found aboard ships on the high seas.

North Korea seemed Saturday to have interpreted the seizure resolution as a "blockade." But at the insistence of China and Russia, the North's traditional allies, the resolution does not authorize the use of military action to enforce any seizure that a North Korean vessel might resist, nor does it restrict shipments of food or other nonmilitary goods.

"An attempted blockade of any kind by the United States and its followers will be regarded as an act of war and met with a decisive military response," North Korea said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said North Korea's "continuing provocative actions are deeply regrettable."

The bellicose language in North Korea's statement -- which describes the Security Council action as "another ugly product of American-led international pressure" -- is similar in tone to previous North Korean responses to U.N. sanctions.

But the North's announcement that it would process enriched uranium to make more weapons was an extraordinary public admission of active involvement in a program whose existence has been denied by Pyongyang since 2002, when it was first mentioned in a U.S. intelligence report.

That year, the Bush administration accused North Korea of secretly continuing with nuclear weapons development in violation of a 1994 agreement. It then canceled construction of two light-water reactors in the North that were to have been used to produce electricity for the impoverished country.

But in 2007, the Bush administration began to back off its assertions that North Korea had an active program to enrich uranium. The chief U.S. intelligence officer for North Korea, Joseph R. DeTrani, told Congress at the time that although there was "high confidence" that North Korea had acquired materials that could be used in a "production-scale" uranium program, there was only "mid-confidence" that such a program existed.

Uranium enrichment, which offers a different route for making nuclear weapons than plutonium, uses centrifuges to spin hot uranium gas into weapons-grade fuel.

Insisting that it had no uranium-enrichment program, the North Korean government took an American diplomat to a missile factory in 2007, where there were aluminum tubes that some experts had said could be used in uranium enrichment. North Korea allowed the diplomat to take home some samples.

Traces of enriched uranium were unexpectedly discovered on those samples. Other traces were found on the pages of reactor records that North Korea turned over to the United States in 2008, as part of now-aborted negotiations on denuclearizing the North.

In recent years, U.S. officials have suggested that although North Korea has tried to enrich uranium, it has not been very successful.

North Korea on Saturday said it has indeed made progress.

"Enough success has been made in developing uranium-enrichment technology to provide nuclear fuel to allow the experimental procedure," the government said. "The process of uranium enrichment will be commenced."

This may have been bluster, at least in the short term.

It will take many years for the North to develop the uranium route to a bomb, according to Siegfried S. Hecker, a periodic visitor to the Yongbyon complex who was director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and is co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Writing last month in Foreign Policy magazine, Hecker said North Korea lacks uranium centrifuge materials, technology and know-how. He warned, however, that Iran has mastered this technology and could help the North move forward with uranium enrichment. North Korea and Iran have shared long-range missile technology that could enable both countries to deliver a nuclear warhead.

North Korea also said Saturday that the spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor are being reprocessed, with all the resulting plutonium to be used in nuclear weapons. The government said that it has reprocessed more than a third of them.

Hecker said in a recent interview that there is enough plutonium in the spent rods for "one or two more" nuclear tests. He also said it would take the North about six months to restart its Yongbyon plant, and that it could then produce enough plutonium to make about one nuclear bomb a year for the next decade.

Early this year, North Korean officials said that technicians have used all the plutonium previously manufactured at Yongbyon to make nuclear weapons.

In South Korea on Saturday, several analysts said the North's fist-shaking response to Security Council sanctions suggests that hard-liners in the country's military are exercising increasing power in running the government.

Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke last summer and has appeared frail in public appearances. He is believed to have chosen his youngest son, Jong Un, as his successor. It is unknown, however, how far the succession process has progressed in the secretive communist state.

"Given Kim's ailing health . . . the North Korean leader is likely to have yielded to the demands and pressure of military people who have little awareness of the outside world," said Koh Yu-hwan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.

Special correspondent Stella Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.