North Korea drops a uranium bombshell

By Donald Kirk

NEW YORK - Suddenly, North Korea's peace offensive has exploded in a mushroom cloud with word from Pyongyang that the North's nuclear wizards are about to enter "the completion stage" of their program to develop nuclear warheads with highly enriched uranium.

Pyongyang said on Friday it was in the final stage of enriching uranium, a process that would give it a path to making nuclear weapons other than plutonium-based devices.

For those who may have forgotten the history, it was the revelation nearly seven years ago that North Korea had a highly enriched uranium program entirely separate from its plutonium program at its complex at Yongbyon that set in motion the sequence that finally detonated the 1994 Geneva framework agreement.

Under that agreement, North Korea had shut down its experimental five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon while teams of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) rotated in and out of the North to confirm the program was really suspended.

But all the while, as US intelligence had gathered from multiple sources, including spy satellites, the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan - the "father" of the Pakistan atomic bomb - and exchanges between North Korea and Iran, the North was continuing its program in enriched uranium.

North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju acknowledged the program in October 2002 to a mission led by James Kelly, then the US envoy on the North, to Pyongyang. After this, the US cut off the shipments of heavy oil it had been sending to the North during construction of twin light-water nuclear energy reactors, all as agreed on in the Geneva framework.

North Korea then kicked out the IAEA inspectors and in early 2003 revved up its reactor and began producing "weapons-grade plutonium" - enough, analysts said, for half a dozen to a dozen warheads, two of which it has already exploded in underground tests in October 2006 and May this year.

The uranium program has since 2002 had a history of, now you see it, now you don't - or rather of high-level American diplomats shutting their eyes to the reality of what was happening as they focused on bringing North Korea back to terms on a new nuclear agreement.

The US State Department for several years called it the HEU program - HEU for "highly enriched uranium" - but then adopted the more diplomatically selective initials, UEP for "uranium enrichment program", deliberately downplaying the program's significance. The existence of the UEP as anything other than a very tentative experimental quest conducted perhaps by overeager North Korean scientists was not questioned.

North Korea for years issued aggrieved denials that Kang had said anything about the program, accusing Kelly and his veteran State Department translator of fabricating the conversation. However, it was more open about a program while confronting South Korea and the United States with increasingly vituperative rhetoric.

North Korea was also adamant about not returning to the six-party talks under which it had gone along with highly contrived agreements in February and October 2007 that gave the world the impression it was preparing to abandon its whole nuclear dream, in return for untold riches of energy and other forms of aid.

North Korea's announcement now of serious progress toward developing a nuclear warhead with highly enriched uranium at its core appears a tough response to the strong sanctions adopted by the United Nations Security Council in June. The impression is that of a spiraling confrontation in which North Korea dared the Security Council to act in the wake of its nuclear test on May 25.

The tone of the North Korean statement, as carried by Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency, revealed if nothing else the effectiveness of the sanctions in crimping if not stopping the North's export trade in conventional arms as well as inter-continental ballistic missiles.

The sanctions have also cut off the import of a wide range of products that have nothing to do with military programs, including luxury items for the North's elite. Moreover, they block the North from virtually all international financial dealings, including many with its main ally and benefactor, China.

North Korea, said the letter conveyed to the UN Security Council by the North's mission in New York, will have "no choice but to take yet stronger self-defensive counter-measures as it had already warned if the sanctions remain in effect". A spokesman for the North's UN mission was quoted by South Korea's Yonhap News agency as confirming it was "true we sent the letter" and "all of what the KCNA reported was true" about the "final phase" of the uranium program. "Had the UN Security Council, from the very beginning, not made an issue of the DPRK's [Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea] peaceful satellite launch in the same way as it kept silent over the satellite launch conducted by South Korea on August 25, 2009, it would not have compelled the DPRK to take strong counteraction, such as its second nuclear test," said the letter, which was sent to the UN in response to questions about a North Korean arms shipment seized near the United Arab Emirates (UAE). (See Storm over North Korea-Iran arms vessel, Asia Times Online, Aug 31)

North Korea issued the statement at an extraordinary juncture. It comes on the heels of a month-long charm offensive that began with the release to former US president Bill Clinton of two women from Al Gore's Current TV network who had been held for 140 days after having been captured by North Korean soldiers - "violently", they have said, on the Chinese side of the frozen-over Tumen River border with China.

Clinton met with North Korea's ailing leader for three hours and 17 minutes and then reported on his "unofficial" mission to US President Barack Obama a week after having delivered the two women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, to their families in a blaze of global publicity.

Kim Jong-il was soon posing for photos again, this time with Hyun Jeong-eun, chairwoman of Hyundai Asan, the Hyundai satellite company responsible for developing the economic zone at Kaesong and the tourist zone at Mount Kumkang. North Korea released a Hyundai Asan technician who had been held for 117 days after attempting to lure a North Korean waitress to South Korea with promises of a great life in comparison to existence under Kim's dictatorship.

Then came the death on August 18 of the former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, the man who had initiated the South's "Sunshine" policy with North Korea and met with Kim Jong-il in the first inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in June 2000. A special delegation came down from Pyongyang, laid a wreath before Kim's casket and met with South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak, previously reviled as a "traitor" and American "lackey".

Finally, North Korea opened up the Kaesong Economic Complex to normal commercial traffic, agreed to resume tours for South Koreans to the adjacent ancient capital of Kaesong and met with a South Korean delegation to discuss holding reunions of a few more families divided by the Korean War that ended in 1953. They're supposed to meet late this month - the first such get-togethers in two years.

So what's going on now? One explanation may be that the US nuclear envoy, Stephen Bosworth, is touring the region - flying from Beijing to Seoul - and Kim Jong-il may have decided the time is ripe to bait the hook for the two-party talks that he seems to want desperately with the US in place of the discarded six-party process.

At the same time, North Korea has sent a delegation to Beijing, chatting with the Chinese who may have been telling Kim Jong-il to lighten up and make nice.

The US, though, is sticking to its demand for six-party talks. Analysts say Washington is pursuing a "two-track" strategy, with Bosworth engaging in diplomatic efforts while sticking to the demand for a revival of the six-party process and the promise of tete-a-tetes "on the sidelines" between the Americans, meaning himself, and the North Koreans.

The other track is firmness in sticking to the sanctions that have so infuriated - and alarmed - the North Koreans. They're fearful of losing arms shipments, as happened a month ago in the UAE seizure, which cost them a boatload of rocket-propelled grenades and other hardware bound for Iran - and also missing the goodies that Kim Jong-il showers on family members and favored friends and aides.

North Korea has its own two-track strategy - making conciliatory gestures without any sign of giving up its nuclear program, which has been at the heart of the problem for years.

Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.

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