North Korea ups nuke standoff stakes

NORTH KOREA raised the stakes in a nuclear standoff yesterday by saying for the first time it had processed fuel rods that could be used to make atomic bombs.

A North Korean Foreign Ministry statement said Pyongyang would continue to boost its nuclear deterrent because the United States remained hostile to the communist North. A vice-foreign minister said Pyongyang would not pass on its nuclear capability to others.

“North Korea successfully finished the reprocessing of some 8,000 spent fuel rods,” said the statement, published by the official KCNA news agency. It dismissed as groundless reports that more international talks could be held soon to try to end the crisis but, significantly, did not rule them out altogether.

Analysts, officials and diplomats said North Korea’s comments fitted a familiar pattern used to try to force concessions from the United States and put pressure on ally China and, if anything, added strength to the view talks could take place soon.

“This is what North Korea always does before negotiating,” said Jin Canrong, an international relations expert at the People’s University in Beijing.

He said China would insist that the North participate in more six-way talks including Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States and predicted that they would take place in November after this month’s APEC summit of Pacific Rim leaders in Bangkok.

“If it unequivocally refuses China’s demand, China’s attitude will become more stern. And under the current conditions, if China changes its attitude, North Korea will feel extremely heavy pressure, pressure it will not be able to resist,” he said.

Seoul’s Foreign Ministry urged the North to refrain from taking steps that would worsen the situation.

“The North’s announcement was very regrettable,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Shin Bong-kil said in a statement. “We are deeply concerned it not only undermines inter-Korean relations and efforts for the peaceful resolution of the nuclear issues but hurts the atmosphere for dialogue set by the previous talks.”

At the truce village of Panmunjom on Thursday, at the heart of the heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone bisecting the peninsula, there was no sign of diplomatic drama.

“It's all pretty quiet,” said one officer at a reception for Swiss veterans of a neutral observer mission.

The North’s statement and reported comments by Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su-hon in New York sounded uncompromising.

According to China’s Xinhua news agency, Choe said in New York his country had a deterrent but would not give its size. Washington has said the North could have one or two atom bombs.

The reprocessing, if confirmed, would be a significant development in North Korea’s nuclear program since the rods can provide plutonium to make fissile material and had been sealed under a 1994 agreement with the United States.

Washington has been anxious about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities since Pyongyang said a year ago it had enriched uranium. It later expelled UN inspectors, pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and took its Yongbyon plant, where the rods are stored, out of mothballs.

Diplomats say it is impossible to verify conclusively whether the rods have been processed as North Korea says, leaving the statement still in the rhetorical realm.

The reprocessing of 8,000 rods could yield enough material to create 20 nuclear bombs, said Yu Suk-ryul, a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul. But he said North Korea did not have expertise to make that many - perhaps five or six in about six months.