North Korea Shows “Sophisticated New Nuclear Enrichment Facility”

November 23, 2010 05:16


Experts in the region could not say if  the calculated revelation is a negotiating ploy by North Korea or a signal that it plans to accelerate its weapons program even as it goes through a perilous leadership change.

The Americano

This is another international problem that the Obama administration did not want, seek, or need.

Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the U.S. Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory,  disclosed over the weekend that North Korea had showed him a rapidly built new, highly sophisticated nuclear enrichment facility. The story was first reported in The New York Times.

Hecker, who is regularly given rare glimpses of the North’s secretive nuclear program, said the program had been built in secret and with remarkable speed. According to the Associated Press (AP), Hecker was taken to North Korea’s main atomic complex and then to a “small industrial scale uranium enrichment facility.” He said he had seen 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, which North Korean officials told him were producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor.

Hecker said what he had seen was “stunning.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said uranium enrichment activities would violate U.N. resolutions and agreements by North Korea over its nuclear program.

“From my perspective, it’s North Korea continuing on a path which is destabilizing for the region. It confirms or validates the concern we’ve had for years about their enriching uranium,” Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

In its story, the New York Times said the new disclosure  creates a new challenge for President Obama at a time when his program for gradual, global nuclear disarmament appears imperiled at home and abroad. The administration hurriedly began to brief allies and lawmakers on Friday and Saturday — and braced for an international debate over the repercussions.

Experts in the region could not say if  the calculated revelation is a negotiating ploy by North Korea or a signal that it plans to accelerate its weapons program even as it goes through a perilous leadership change.

The AP said the Obama administration has shunned direct negotiations with North Korea following its nuclear and missile tests last year and in the wake of an international finding that a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.

“Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges, all neatly aligned and plumbed below us,” wrote Hecker, a Stanford University professor. Hecker described the control room as “astonishingly modern,” writing that, unlike other North Korean facilities, it “would fit into any modern American processing facility.”

American officials know that the plant did not exist in April 2009, when the last Americans and international inspectors were thrown out of the country. The speed with which it was built strongly suggests that the impoverished, isolated country, which tested its first nuclear device in 2006, had foreign help and evaded strict new United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed to punish its rejection of international controls.

A delegation of American experts that included Hecker has already reported that it confirmed satellite photographic evidence of another new advance by the North — a light-water reactor being built on the site of a facility the country had dismantled as part of an agreement with the international community to end its nuclear weapons program.

Many questions are still unanswered about North Korea’s nuclear program, Hecker wrote, including whether the North is really pursuing nuclear electricity, whether it’s abandoning plutonium production, how it obtained such sophisticated centrifuge technology, and why it’s revealing the facilities now?

“One thing is certain,” he said. “These revelations will cause a political firestorm.”

The Americano / Agencies



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