Global Security Newswire

North Korea has pursued uranium enrichment as far back as the 1990s when it built a plant to produce a gas required for enrichment of the nuclear fissile material, Pakistani nuclear scientist and proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan claimed in documents analyzed by the Washington Post in a report last week (see GSN, Dec. 23, 2009).

Khan also claimed that Pyongyang could have been enriching uranium on a limited scale by 2002, with "maybe 3,000 or even more" centrifuges and that the aspiring nuclear power received aid from Pakistan in the form of important drawings, machinery and technical guidance for no less than six years.

Khan's assertions of the uranium gas facility, which he said that the North built on its own, are contained in narrative documents that describe a close relationship between scientists from Pakistan and North Korea going back almost 10 years. His claims could not be independently verified though the Post did verify that the accounts were produced by Khan (see GSN, Nov. 20, 2009).

Khan also claimed that on a trip to North Korea in 1999 he personally viewed boxes filled with parts for three completed nuclear warheads that he was informed could be put together to be fixed to missiles inside of an hour.

The new assertions indicate that Pyongyang could have made more progress than was previously thought in the pursuit of second pathway to producing a nuclear weapon and that it might possess a larger and more advanced arsenal than previously thought.

North Korea already has the ability to reprocess plutonium for use in a warhead. A U.S. diplomat and a U.S. intelligence officer said the assertions could provide understanding for North Korea's own claim in September that it had reached the last stages of uranium enrichment.

However, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker told the Post that he still did not believe that North Korea had enough nuclear material in 1999 to produce the weapons described by Khan. The North did not detonate its first nuclear device until 2006.

Hecker speculated that Khan could have been endeavoring to let himself "off the hook, to say what (he) ... did was not that bad because these guys already had nuclear weapons. That's a nice way to cover his own tracks."

U.S. interest in the North's capacity to enrich uranium is running high. Last month during a trip to Pyongyang, special envoy Stephen Bosworth "strongly put down a marker" that subsequent discussions needed to address North Korea's uranium program, a high-level U.S. official said.

Pakistani representatives in Washington said Khan's claims had no truthful premise.

"Pakistan, as a nuclear weapons state, has always acted with full responsibility and never engaged itself in any activity in violation of the non-proliferation norms," the Pakistani Embassy said in a statement (Smith/Warrick, Washington Post, Dec. 28, 2009).

"The so-called A.Q. Khan proliferation network was effectively dismantled and all relevant information shared with the [International Atomic Energy Agency] and concerned states," said Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit last Tuesday in dismissal of the Post article, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

"A.Q. Khan is a closed chapter. There is no point over dramatizing the A.Q. Khan related stories which are more fiction than facts," Basit said (Xinhua News Agency, Dec. 29, 2009).

North Korean Ambassador to the United Nations Han Song Ryol told the Post that Pyongyang did not begin its uranium program until "only after last April, when the U.S. hostility entered extremely critical stage" and that his country had never discussed its efforts in the area with Khan (Smith/Warrick, Washington Post).

Meanwhile, the government in Pyongyang at the end of 2009 called for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and urged the cessation of antagonistic relations with Washington, Reuters reported Thursday.

"The fundamental task for ensuring peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the rest of Asia is to put an end to the hostile relationship between the D.P.R.K. and the USA," according to an end of the year editorial cited by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Analysts predicted that the North might call for bilateral peace treaty talks with Washington outside of the six-party talks with fellow participants China, Japan, Russia and South Korea and as a precondition of returning to the nuclear disarmament talks. North Korea and the United States are still technically at war, having only signed an armistice agreement following the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Bosworth carried a personal letter from U.S. President Barack Obama to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that entreated him to return his country to disarmament negotiations, last held in December 2008. Pyongyang has said that it recognized the need to return to six-party talks but did not offer a date as to when that might occur.

There is not much hope though that Kim could be persuaded to relinquish his nuclear weapons program, which has long been the centerpiece of his "military first" regime.

"[The] North has absolutely no interest in normalizing relations with the United States. As soon as the North does that, it loses all reason to exist," said North Korean ideology expert B.R. Myers.

"As soon as people think it is possible to get along with America, they will ask themselves why they need a 'military first' policy," Myers said (Jon Herskovitz, Reuters, Dec. 31, 2009).

Belligerent accusations against the United States and South Korea were not in evidence in this year's New Year address as much as in years past, the New York Times noted.

"Unshakable is our stand that we will improve the North-South relations and open the way for national reunification," the government said as it urged South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to dispatch aid to North Korea, which has been under punitive U.N. Security Council sanctions as a result of its nuclear weapons program.

Lee has said that Seoul would not send large amounts of aid to the North before he sees marked effort on the part of Pyongyang to shutter its nuclear weapons program (Choe Sang-hun, New York Times, Jan. 2).

In Seoul, the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis predicted that Pyongyang would carry out a third nuclear test this year in an effort to improve its standing both internationally and domestically as the North Korean government readies itself for the presumed transfer of power from Kim to his youngest son, United Press International reported.

"There is a high possibility that North Korea would conduct a third nuclear test and launch more long-range missiles to solidify itself as a nuclear state," the think tank said in its report. Another nuclear test "would increase the possibility of the international community accepting North Korea as a nuclear weapons state."

Pyongyang announced in November that it reprocessed an additional 8,000 spent fuel rods for "the purpose of bolstering up the nuclear deterrent."

Nuclear experts have said that that amount of fuel rods could produce enough weapon-grade plutonium for one nuclear bomb. South Korea's Defense Ministry has said that the North is thought to already possess enough plutonium for six or seven nuclear weapons.

"With more plutonium in hand, the North may conduct a third nuclear test to miniaturize warheads enough to fit atop its long-range rocket," a defense official said.

Work on North Korea's largest missile base, which has the ability to fire upgraded ICBMs, has also been completed, said military sources in South Korea (Lee Jong-heon, United Press International/Spacewar.com, Dec. 30, 2009).