N. Korea Reports Advances in Enriching Uranium

N. Korea Reports Advances in Enriching Uranium
By DAVID E. SANGER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: September 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/world/asia/04korea.html?th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — North Korea declared Friday that it was in the “concluding stage” of tests to enrich uranium. Its statement would appear to end a decade-long debate within American intelligence agencies about whether the country was working on a second pathway to building nuclear weapons.

The statement came in a brief announcement by the official North Korean news agency, quoting what it said was a letter from the North Korean government to the United Nations. No details were offered, and the use of the word “tests” suggests that the country may only be experimenting and has not yet undertaken the huge expense required to install the thousands of centrifuges necessary to produce enough uranium for a nuclear weapon.

For the North, the new nuclear program would amount to an insurance policy. For decades it pursued another pathway to a bomb, taking the spent fuel from one of its nuclear reactors and producing plutonium. To prove its capacity, the North has conducted two nuclear tests, one that fizzled in 2006 and a more successful detonation in May.

In February 2007, the North agreed to dismantle its reactors and stop producing bomb fuel. But it reversed that commitment this year, and on Friday it said it had harvested the remaining spent fuel, which could provide it with enough plutonium for one or two additional weapons. North Korea was believed to already have enough plutonium for about six to eight nuclear weapons.

But the existence of a second program to build bomb fuel would give the country something else to negotiate over with the West, and it would create the possibility that the government of Kim Jong-il could try to sell the technology, just as it has sold some of its reactor technology. North Korean officials announced in April that they intended to start a uranium enrichment program.

In its brief statement on Friday, the country also hinted at resuming negotiations, saying, “We are prepared for both sanctions and dialogue.”

In Beijing on Friday, the United States’ special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, commented on the North’s claim, Reuters reported. Speaking to reporters, he said: “Obviously, anything that the North is doing in the area of nuclear development is of concern to us.”

In the fall of 2002, aides to President George W. Bush accused the North of seeking to enrich uranium. North Korean officials first seemed to admit proudly to a covert enrichment program, but they later denied it. Mr. Bush used the episode to refuse to negotiate with North Korea and terminated a 1994 agreement on freezing nuclear operations.

But in the aftermath of the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq, American intelligence agencies began to lose confidence in their assessment of North Korea’s nuclear capacity. During a Congressional hearing in 2007, Joseph DeTrani, one of the government’s senior North Korea intelligence experts, said that the intelligence community was assured only at “midconfidence level” that the North Koreans were involved in a uranium enrichment program.

If the North Koreans have only recently conducted tests in uranium enrichment, as their letter stated, it may suggest that the program has been in abeyance and has been resumed for negotiating purposes. The North may also now see enrichment as a cheaper alternative to restarting decrepit nuclear reactors to produce plutonium.

Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from Seoul.