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North Korea Reportedly Displays “Nuclear Deterrent Force”
North Korea recently displayed weapon-grade plutonium to visiting U.S. nuclear and foreign policy experts, including two U.S. congressional aides, the Wall Street Journal reported today (see GSN, Jan. 6). The visiting groups were shown North Korea’s “nuclear deterrent force,” according to a spokesman from Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry. The group “spent about a day at Yongbyon, obtaining the perspective from North Korea on its nuclear program,” said Keith Luse, an aide to Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Victor Cha, a North Korea expert at Georgetown University, said the display could have been used to gain leverage at future talks. Pyongyang might also be attempting “a grand strategy of taking incremental steps to get the world to accept that they are a nuclear weapons state,” he added (Fairclough/Hutzler, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 12). Stanford University professor John Lewis and former Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory Director Siegfried Hecker led the nongovernmental portion of the visit. According to a U.S. official, North Korean officials told the group that the plutonium was recently reprocessed but had not yet been placed in a nuclear device. North Korea said it was willing to “freeze” the process to resolve the current nuclear crisis. “If the visit of Lewis and the nuclear specialist and their party helped the U.S. even a bit to drop its ambiguous view on (North Korea’s) nuclear activities, it would serve as a substantial foundation for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue between (North Korea) and the U.S. in the future,” according to the North Korean Foreign Ministry (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Jan. 11). “If the Bush administration … [would] have a willingness to agree on ‘compensating for the D.P.R.K.’s freeze of nuclear activities’ as the first-phase measure, it [North Korea] is willing to freeze its nuclear activities based on the graphite-moderated reactors as a starting point for the denuclearization of the country,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman said (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Jan. 12). U.S. officials said they are hoping Hecker can shed light on the amount of reprocessed fissile material in North Korea. Previous intelligence estimates have said that Pyongyang most likely has built one or two nuclear weapons and has enough fuel to make two or three more. “This was all about saying, ‘See, we’ve got it, so treat us with some respect,” said an official familiar with the visit to Yongbyon (David Sanger, New York Times, Jan. 11).
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