North Korea Denies Uranium Enrichment Effort

North Korean officials told a recent visiting U.S. delegation that they do not have a secret program to enrich uranium, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Jan. 12).

One member of the delegation, however, was present in October 2002 when North Korean officials allegedly acknowledged the program, according to the Post.

“They absolutely, totally stuck to the script on the HEU (highly enriched uranium) program: ‘We don’t have one,’” a senior administration official said.

The Bush administration has insisted that North Korea must verifiably dismantle it’s Yongbyon plutonium production facility and its suspected uranium enrichment program before the United States would provide nonaggression guarantees and economic incentives for Pyongyang (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Jan. 13).

North Korea also denied that it had a nuclear warhead, saying that estimates of its nuclear capability have been exaggerated.

“They said, ‘We have the potential to make nuclear weapons, but we do not have a weapon,’” said a South Korean official. “They were very adamant in their denials,” the official added.

The visiting U.S. delegation was brought to Yongbyon and shown the cooling pond where fuel rods are stored from North Korea’s small nuclear reactor. The group was also shown what was said to be recently reprocessed plutonium but was not allowed to take a sample of or photograph the material.

“The U.S. delegates consistently said they had a hard time making a final decision on what they had seen in the North,” said Wi Sung-lac, a South Korean Foreign Ministry official (Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 13).

Meanwhile, a nine-member delegation from the international consortium created to implement the now-suspended 1994 agreement to freeze North Korea’s nuclear activities is scheduled to meet with North Korean officials for three days this week to discuss the suspension of construction of nuclear reactors in North Korea. The meetings will focus on issues such as preserving facilities and equipment, a South Korean official said (Associated Press/Environmental News Network, Jan. 13).

In Japan, authorities arrested businessman Yoshifumi Yoshihara today for attempting to ship equipment to North Korea that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. A North Korean woman living in Japan, Ri Yong Sun, was also arrested on the same case.

The two shipped an inverter for an industrial washing machine last November from Yokohama to North Korea but the equipment was blocked in Beijing. The inverters could be have been reprogrammed for use in uranium enrichment equipment, according to the Mainichi Daily News.

“I didn’t know how the inverter would be used,” Yoshihara said (Mainichi Daily News, Jan. 13).

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