North Korea ‘has turned nuclear fuel into weapons’

NORTH KOREA said yesterday it had converted the plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons to serve as a deterrent against a possible nuclear strike by the US.

Warning that the danger of war on the Korean peninsula “is snowballing”, vice foreign minister Choe Su Hon blamed the US for intensifying threats to attack the communist nation and destroying the basis for negotiations to resolve the dispute over Pyongyang’s nuclear programme.

But Mr Choe told the UN that North Korea is still ready to dismantle its nuclear programme if Washington abandons its “hostile policy” and is prepared to coexist peacefully.

At the moment, however, he said “the ever intensifying US hostile policy and the clandestine nuclear-related experiments recently revealed in South Korea are constituting big stumbling blocks” and make it impossible for North Korea to participate in the continuation of six-nation talks on its nuclear programme.

In Washington, a State Department official said North Korea should take part in the six-nation discussions and noted that the secretary of state Colin Powell has said repeatedly that the US has no plans to attack the secretive communist country.

Mr Choe said North Korea has been left with “no other option but to possess a nuclear deterrent” because of US policies that he claimed were designed to “eliminate the DPRK by force while designating it as part of an ‘axis of evil’ and a target of pre-emptive nuclear strikes”.

At a press conference afterwards with a small group of reporters, the North Korean minister was asked what was included in the nuclear deterrent.

“We have already made clear that we have already reprocessed 8,000 wasted fuel rods and transformed them into arms,” he said.

When asked if the fuel had been turned into actual weapons, not just weapons-grade material, Mr Choe said: “We declared that we weaponised this.”

Julie Enzer, head of the Washington-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute, when asked about Choe’s comments, said “it certainly sounds like they’ve taken the spent fuel rods and further enriched them to be weapons-grade uranium and put them in some kind of weapon”.

Mr Choe gave no details on the kind or number of weapons.

North Korea said earlier this year that it had reprocessed the spent nuclear fuel rods and was increasing its “nuclear deterrent” but did not provide any details.

South Korean deputy foreign minister Lee Soo-hyuck said in late April that it was estimated that eight nuclear bombs could be made if all 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods were reprocessed.

Before the reprocessing occurred, South Korea said that it believed that the North had enough nuclear material to build one or two nuclear bombs.