|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Money Not Enough to Pry North Korea Nuke Secrets NewsMax.com Wires SEOUL -- Secretive North Korea finally bowed to international pressure to close its nuclear facilities, but the final goal of making it completely give up its atomic weaponry remains extremely remote, analysts say. North Korea shut its nuclear reactor and plant that makes weapons-grade plutonium as part of a disarmament-for-aid deal, just as six-country talks got underway this week in Beijing aimed at advancing the process. In what could be a sign of the difficulties ahead, those discussions ended on Friday without the firm year-end deadline for further steps most participants hoped for. Regional powers want North Korea to account for its nuclear inventory, dismantle facilities and give up the fissile material it has squirreled away to make atomic bombs. But for impoverished North Korea, analysts say the threat of attack is about its only bargaining chip and it is unlikely to give up the most powerful component of that threat -- nuclear arms. "For North Korea, blackmail doesn't just work, it works wonders," said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea analyst and professor at Kookmin University. North Korea has agreed to fully account for its known plutonium stockpiles in a deal reached with South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States. Story Continues Below
But even with the promise of massive aid and losing the stigma of being an international pariah by complying, no one is sure if Pyongyang will completely disclose details of its plans to enrich uranium for weapons or ever let the world know what it has been doing in secret. "This is a program that the North has staked the fate of its regime on," said Cho Min, a North Korea expert at the South's Korea institute for National Unification. And there is no known public case of a country actually exploding a nuclear device, as North Korea did in October 2006, and then abandoning that ability. The paranoid state has been a prodigious digger of tunnels for decades to hide its most guarded secrets. Intelligence sources have said the North likely has hundreds of large facilities and thousands of smaller ones underground or in mountains where it secretly works to build nuclear arms, missiles and other weapons. North Korea's main nuclear complex at Yongbyon is located in plain view of U.S. spy satellites. Disabling its key components -- a reactor, a plutonium separation plant and a fuel fabrication factory -- will likely require substantial payments of money or goods to North Korea for each step that is taken, officials have suggested. What it has done already was directly linked to shipments of heavy fuel oil, and stalled for months when Pyongyang also demanded the end of a freeze on some of its funds held abroad. In 2002, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said Pyongyang was constructing a plant that could enrich enough uranium for two or more bombs a year by 2005. However, earlier this year, U.S. officials said they may have overestimated that program. North Korea has plenty of natural uranium but not the equipment or even a reliable source of electricity to run enough centrifuges for a large-scale enrichment program, proliferation experts have said. "I don't believe they have a full scale uranium enrichment facility," said Daniel Pinkston, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program for the California-based Center for Nonproliferation Studies. North Korea's first nuclear test in October was with a plutonium-based weapon. But its relatively low yield led many experts to question whether there were design flaws. Seoul National University nuclear professor Lee Un-chul said there may also be problems in reprocessing plutonium. Despite spending decades and its limited funds on a nuclear program, all the North appears to have to show for it is one antiquated reactor, enough plutonium for six to 10 weapons and the inability to replicate a plutonium bomb design from the 1940s. "To have a robust deterrent, you must have reliable nuclear weapons, and they have not demonstrated that. They haven't demonstrated the ability to miniaturize weapons to fit one on a warhead," Pinkston said. However, it did develop such warheads, Pyongyang already has long-range missiles on hand capable of carrying them to neighbors like Japan and beyond. And even while it negotiates an end to its nuclear program, North Korea may still try to improve its nuclear weapons design at one of its secret sites, analyst have speculated. While a second test would help advance its design, it would also deplete the North's precious plutonium stockpile and likely deepen Pyongyang's isolation. The U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions after the first test. Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. envoy to the nuclear talks, estimated the North likely had about 50 kg of plutonium. Hill is hoping to have North Korea's main nuclear facilities disabled by the end of the year and the country surrender its fissile material by the end of 2008. But in an interview with Reuters, he added: "They demand high prices for everything."
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2008 NewsMax.Com |