UN nuclear watchdog condemns North Korea

The UN nuclear watchdog today deplored North Korea’s decision to remove seals and surveillance cameras from nuclear facilities that Washington says could yield weapons within months.

Washington and its allies urged Pyongyang to rescind its decision.

North Korea began removing UN seals and ”disrupting” cameras at a laboratory used to extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel rods, said the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“There isn’t any legitimate purpose for the facility other than separating plutonium from spent fuel,” a step in the process of making nuclear weapons, said IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky in Vienna.

North Korea indicated today that the “nuclear issue” could be settled if the United States agrees to a long-standing demand for a non-aggression treaty.

“The US should stop posing a nuclear threat to the DPRK and accept the DPRK’s proposal for the conclusion of a non-aggression treaty between the two countries,” the North’s official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said in an editorial. DPRK stands for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The United States, which is South Korea’s chief ally, says it wants a diplomatic solution, but opposes talks unless North Korea first abandons nuclear weapons development.

The IAEA, which has been monitoring the facilities, said Pyongyang this weekend unsealed a spent fuel storage chamber that holds 8,000 irradiated fuel rods.

“As the spent fuel contains a significant amount of plutonium, North Korea’s action is of great non-proliferation concern,” said IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei.

He said it was “deplorable” that Pyongyang had not responded to his requests for “an urgently needed discussion on safeguards issues.”

“The 8,000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular concern because they could be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons,” said US State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said.

Pyongyang’s move raised fears of a nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula similar to one involving the same facilities in 1994. At that time, officials in Seoul and Washington feared a heightened possibility of war with North Korea.

Conflict was averted when North Korea agreed to freeze the facilities in a deal with the United States. But it said last week that it planned to reactivate them to produce electricity because Washington had failed to follow through on a pledge to provide energy.

North Korea said the IAEA failed to respond to its request to remove the equipment, compelling it to do so itself.

The IAEA said the seals and surveillance equipment had been removed from the spent fuel pond, which stores the fuel rods, at the Soviet-designed reactor in Yongbyon, 50 miles north of Pyongyang.

Fintor, of the US State Department, said spent fuel rods had “no relevance” for generating electricity.

Their unsealing “belies North Korea’s announced justification to produce electricity,” he said.

Security experts believe North Korea made one or two nuclear weapons using plutonium it extracted from the Yongbyon reactor in the 1990s. Now there are fears it will reprocess plutonium fuel rods that were separated from the Yongbyon reactor, and later stored under supervision by IAEA inspectors.

“They’re going to be able to build four to five additional nuclear weapons within months if they begin that reprocessing operation,” said US Senator Joseph Biden.