North Korea drops a uranium bombshell By Donald Kirk
NEW YORK - Suddenly, North Korea's peace offensive has exploded in a mushroom
cloud with word from Pyongyang that the North's nuclear wizards are about to
enter "the completion stage" of their program to develop nuclear warheads with
highly enriched uranium.
Pyongyang said on Friday it was in the final stage of enriching uranium, a
process that would give it a path to making nuclear weapons other than
plutonium-based devices.
For those who may have forgotten the history, it was the revelation nearly
seven years ago that North Korea had a highly enriched uranium program entirely
separate from its plutonium program at its complex at Yongbyon that set in
motion the
sequence that finally detonated the 1994 Geneva framework agreement.
Under that agreement, North Korea had shut down its experimental five-megawatt
reactor at Yongbyon while teams of inspectors from the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) rotated in and out of the North to confirm the program was
really suspended.
But all the while, as US intelligence had gathered from multiple sources,
including spy satellites, the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan - the "father" of
the Pakistan atomic bomb - and exchanges between North Korea and Iran, the
North was continuing its program in enriched uranium.
North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju acknowledged the program in
October 2002 to a mission led by James Kelly, then the US envoy on the North,
to Pyongyang. After this, the US cut off the shipments of heavy oil it had been
sending to the North during construction of twin light-water nuclear energy
reactors, all as agreed on in the Geneva framework.
North Korea then kicked out the IAEA inspectors and in early 2003 revved up its
reactor and began producing "weapons-grade plutonium" - enough, analysts said,
for half a dozen to a dozen warheads, two of which it has already exploded in
underground tests in October 2006 and May this year.
The uranium program has since 2002 had a history of, now you see it, now you
don't - or rather of high-level American diplomats shutting their eyes to the
reality of what was happening as they focused on bringing North Korea back to
terms on a new nuclear agreement.
The US State Department for several years called it the HEU program - HEU for
"highly enriched uranium" - but then adopted the more diplomatically selective
initials, UEP for "uranium enrichment program", deliberately downplaying the
program's significance. The existence of the UEP as anything other than a very
tentative experimental quest conducted perhaps by overeager North Korean
scientists was not questioned.
North Korea for years issued aggrieved denials that Kang had said anything
about the program, accusing Kelly and his veteran State Department translator
of fabricating the conversation. However, it was more open about a program
while confronting South Korea and the United States with increasingly
vituperative rhetoric.
North Korea was also adamant about not returning to the six-party talks under
which it had gone along with highly contrived agreements in February and
October 2007 that gave the world the impression it was preparing to abandon its
whole nuclear dream, in return for untold riches of energy and other forms of
aid.
North Korea's announcement now of serious progress toward developing a nuclear
warhead with highly enriched uranium at its core appears a tough response to
the strong sanctions adopted by the United Nations Security Council in June.
The impression is that of a spiraling confrontation in which North Korea dared
the Security Council to act in the wake of its nuclear test on May 25.
The tone of the North Korean statement, as carried by Pyongyang's Korean
Central News Agency, revealed if nothing else the effectiveness of the
sanctions in crimping if not stopping the North's export trade in conventional
arms as well as inter-continental ballistic missiles.
The sanctions have also cut off the import of a wide range of products that
have nothing to do with military programs, including luxury items for the
North's elite. Moreover, they block the North from virtually all international
financial dealings, including many with its main ally and benefactor, China.
North Korea, said the letter conveyed to the UN Security Council by the North's
mission in New York, will have "no choice but to take yet stronger
self-defensive counter-measures as it had already warned if the sanctions
remain in effect". A spokesman for the North's UN mission was quoted by South
Korea's Yonhap News agency as confirming it was "true we sent the letter" and
"all of what the KCNA reported was true" about the "final phase" of the uranium
program. "Had the UN Security Council, from the very beginning, not made an
issue of the DPRK's [Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea]
peaceful satellite launch in the same way as it kept silent over the satellite
launch conducted by South Korea on August 25, 2009, it would not have compelled
the DPRK to take strong counteraction, such as its second nuclear test," said
the letter, which was sent to the UN in response to questions about a North
Korean arms shipment seized near the United Arab Emirates (UAE). (See
Storm over North Korea-Iran arms vessel, Asia Times Online, Aug 31)
North Korea issued the statement at an extraordinary juncture. It comes on the
heels of a month-long charm offensive that began with the release to former US
president Bill Clinton of two women from Al Gore's Current TV network who had
been held for 140 days after having been captured by North Korean soldiers -
"violently", they have said, on the Chinese side of the frozen-over Tumen River
border with China.
Clinton met with North Korea's ailing leader for three hours and 17 minutes and
then reported on his "unofficial" mission to US President Barack Obama a week
after having delivered the two women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, to their
families in a blaze of global publicity.
Kim Jong-il was soon posing for photos again, this time with Hyun Jeong-eun,
chairwoman of Hyundai Asan, the Hyundai satellite company responsible for
developing the economic zone at Kaesong and the tourist zone at Mount Kumkang.
North Korea released a Hyundai Asan technician who had been held for 117 days
after attempting to lure a North Korean waitress to South Korea with promises
of a great life in comparison to existence under Kim's dictatorship.
Then came the death on August 18 of the former South Korean president Kim
Dae-jung, the man who had initiated the South's "Sunshine" policy with North
Korea and met with Kim Jong-il in the first inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in
June 2000. A special delegation came down from Pyongyang, laid a wreath before
Kim's casket and met with South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak, previously
reviled as a "traitor" and American "lackey".
Finally, North Korea opened up the Kaesong Economic Complex to normal
commercial traffic, agreed to resume tours for South Koreans to the adjacent
ancient capital of Kaesong and met with a South Korean delegation to discuss
holding reunions of a few more families divided by the Korean War that ended in
1953. They're supposed to meet late this month - the first such get-togethers
in two years.
So what's going on now? One explanation may be that the US nuclear envoy,
Stephen Bosworth, is touring the region - flying from Beijing to Seoul - and
Kim Jong-il may have decided the time is ripe to bait the hook for the
two-party talks that he seems to want desperately with the US in place of the
discarded six-party process.
At the same time, North Korea has sent a delegation to Beijing, chatting with
the Chinese who may have been telling Kim Jong-il to lighten up and make nice.
The US, though, is sticking to its demand for six-party talks. Analysts say
Washington is pursuing a "two-track" strategy, with Bosworth engaging in
diplomatic efforts while sticking to the demand for a revival of the six-party
process and the promise of tete-a-tetes "on the sidelines" between the
Americans, meaning himself, and the North Koreans.
The other track is firmness in sticking to the sanctions that have so
infuriated - and alarmed - the North Koreans. They're fearful of losing arms
shipments, as happened a month ago in the UAE seizure, which cost them a
boatload of rocket-propelled grenades and other hardware bound for Iran - and
also missing the goodies that Kim Jong-il showers on family members and favored
friends and aides.
North Korea has its own two-track strategy - making conciliatory gestures
without any sign of giving up its nuclear program, which has been at the heart
of the problem for years.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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