US, UK urged to prevent N-Korean nuclear build-up

The United States, Britain and the wider international community has been urged to prevent North Korea from building up its nuclear weapons capability after the communist nation began actively restarting its nuclear programme.

North Korea began moving fresh fuel rods into a mothballed nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, 50 miles north of its capital Pyongyang, on Wednesday, deepening fears that the country could produce nuclear weapons within months.

The move was seen as a ratcheting-up of pressure on the US and its allies, which recently cut off oil shipments to North Korea in response to revelations that it had been secretly developing nuclear weapons in violation of an eight-year-old agreement.

South Korean president Kim Dae-jung responded to the move by pledging his country would never tolerate its rogue neighbour’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons. He said the stand-off should be resolved through dialogue.

“We can never go along with North Korea’s nuclear weapons development,” President Kim said.

“We must closely cooperate with the United States, Japan and other friendly countries to prevent the situation from further deteriorating into a crisis.”

In Britain, Liberal Democrat spokesman Menzies Campbell said the situation threatened to destabilise the region.

He said: “North Korea’s determination to abandon previous agreement and to achieve military nuclear capability is deeply destabilising.

“This is an issue which affects China, Russia and Japan regionally as well as the United States and United Kingdom strategically.

“Every effort must be made to put North Korea back in the box before things get out of hand.”

The UN’s nuclear chief described the move as “very worrying”.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: “The big worry is if they start to operate the reprocessing plant that will produce plutonium, which can be directly used to manufacture nuclear weapons - and there again we have no way to verify the nature of the activity.

“So the situation is very worrying.”

Earlier this month, North Korea announced plans to restart its nuclear facilities, frozen under a 1994 agreement with the US and its allies. It has removed UN monitoring equipment from the reactor and three other key nuclear facilities.

State media in Pyongyang defended the decision.

“The United States is going around trying to stir public opinion internationally, as though this is a sign of developing nuclear weapons,” Radio Pyongyang said.

“Our measure has got nothing to do with plans to develop nuclear weapons. Our republic constantly maintains an anti-nuclear, peace-loving position.”

Former Conservative Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind said the situation in North Korea was “an even more serious and even more imminent threat” than Iraq.

He said the US must take into account the “realities” that the communist nation had “cut itself off from the world for more than half a century” and unlike Iraq had no loyalties.

“Its behaviour is arbitrary and unpredictable,” Malcolm Rifkind, who was also Defence Secretary, wrote in The Times.

“The American and international reaction must take into account these realities. The response has to rely less on rhetoric and more on traditional, sensitive diplomacy.

“Even the hawks in the White House and the Pentagon will freely acknowledge that the United States cannot be the world’s policeman by itself; that this international crisis can be resolved only by an international response.

“America, Russia and China, working together, can cajole, threaten and occasionally bribe the North Koreans into abandoning their nuclear option. America, by itself, can do little more than bribe.”