North Korea 'may have only one nuke'

North Korea may have only a single nuclear weapon and there is no proof that the reclusive country has actually produced any, the head of the international consortium set up to replace North Korea’s plutonium-producing reactors said.

Figures up to a half-dozen and sometimes more are circulated in discussions of North Korea’s self-proclaimed program. South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck said in April that North Korea could make eight bombs by reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has criticised US President George W Bush for not opening direct dialogue with North Korea on nuclear disarmament, saying: “Today, there are four to seven nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea.”

“When you get into this discussion about the numbers, it quickly sort of becomes people seeking facts,” said Charles Kartman, the executive director of the New York-based Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation, known as KEDO, said yesterday.

“They feel comfortable with the numbers because they imply facts. These aren’t facts. They’re worst-casing all sorts of stuff. There may be zero. The number of proven weapons is zero,” Kartman said.

Experts believed in the mid-1990s that North Korea might have reprocessed some plutonium from its Russian-supplied reactor complex at Yongbyon, because the International Atomic Energy Agency found traces of it in a chemical analysis of samples from the site.

“There is a maximum amount of plutonium that could have been reprocessed, and if that is true, then depending on the state of North Korean technology, it would have been sufficient for one, or at most, two (weapons),” Kartman said.

Now when you get to the number two, you are really applying the worst case scenario. Everything has to run right,” Kartman said. “You’re not going to get too many responsible scientists going along with the number two” from that time period in the mid-1990s.

KEDO was formed in 1995 to finance and build two light-water reactors, from which it is difficult to extract weapons-grade plutonium, to replace North Korea’s graphite-based reactor at Yongbyon.

The executive board members of KEDO are representatives of the US, South Korea, Japan, and the EU.