North Korea to Resume Plutonium Production in One Week

By Greg Webb
Global Security Newswire

VIENNA — North Korea plans to resume producing plutonium in one week, officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency today, strengthening prospects that a 2007 denuclearization agreement will be eviscerated (see GSN, Sept. 23).

The agency’s top safeguards official, Olli Heinonen, announced the development to a meeting today of the agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors in Vienna.  The news followed a North Korean request for IAEA personnel to remove seals and cameras from the nation’s reprocessing facility, designed to separate plutonium from the spent fuel of the nation’s nearby nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

The seal removal “was completed today.  There are no more IAEA seals and surveillance equipment in place at the reprocessing facility,” IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told reporters today after Heinonen briefed the board.

“The D.P.R.K. has also informed the IAEA inspectors that they plan to introduce nuclear material to the reprocessing plant in one week’s time,” she added.  “They further stated that from here on the IAEA inspectors will have no further access to the reprocessing plant.”

North Korean officials have not, however, asked agency staffers to remove seals at its spent fuel storage site, a move that would be necessary to resume operations at the reprocessing plant.

The agency has therefore decided to keep its officials at Yongbyon in expectation of another seal-removal request within days.

“They have no plans to leave,” said a diplomat familiar with agency affairs.

Agency officials have also been monitoring other facilities at Yongbyon, including the five-megawatt nuclear reactor, the spent-fuel storage pond and a fuel fabrication facility.  North Korea has used all of these to produce and separate enough plutonium for several nuclear weapons.

“The obviously bad decision” by North Korea was “a shoe we were expecting to drop,” said Charles Kartman, the final head of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, an institution created to implement an abandoned 1994 deal to freeze North Korea’s nuclear activity.  “It basically torpedoes the [2007] agreement.”

There are only two good explanations for Pyongyang’s decision, Kartman said: a desire to build more nuclear weapons or an effort to acquire more leverage against the United States and the other five parties to the denuclearization agreement.

He estimated that North Korea’s spent fuel contains only about one nuclear bomb’s worth of plutonium, so its ability to supplement its arsenal is minimal.  Therefore, North Korea was most likely “shaking the tree and getting people’s attention,” he said.

“What they’ve done is trouble,” Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters today in Vienna.  He otherwise responded with restrained rhetoric by expressing support for the six-nation negotiation that had led North Korea last year to agree to abandon its nuclear programs.  That process has stuttered recently as Pyongyang has objected to a U.S. proposal to verify the absence of nuclear activity.

“North Korean moves to halt and reverse disablement, and most recently remove
IAEA seals and cameras from the reprocessing facility, are unsettling,” Schulte told the IAEA board.

“The North Korean actions are very disappointing and run counter to the expectations of the members of the six-party talks and the international community," added White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe.  “We strongly urge the North to reconsider these steps and come back immediately into compliance with its obligations as outlined in the six-party agreements.”

"As we have stated on many occasions, we are open to further discussions with the North on their obligations under a verification protocol,” Johndroe said.

The IAEA officials in Yongbyon removed about 100 seals and 20-25 cameras from the shuttered reprocessing plant, Reuters reported.  The measures were intended to prevent North Korea from conducting any secret activity; without the presence of the equipment or of human monitors, tracking North Korea’s production of plutonium will be far more difficult.

Present and former Bush administration officials believe the best option now might be just to sustain the six-nation diplomatic effort until the next president can take over, the Washington Times reported yesterday.

Resumption of reactor operations at Yongbyon could not begin before U.S. President George W. Bush leaves office in January, the officials said.

“We are at a crossroads, and we don't have many options," one official said.  “They are not quite there (with reassembling), but they appear to be moving in that direction.”

Pyongyang believes it was “misled” by Washington during the talks, according to one former official.  “Things may get worse before they get better,” the official said.

“If I'm right, then perhaps the best that we can hope for is that things don't deteriorate too much, and that we manage to keep the negotiating process on life support until January,” he said.

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