Clock ticking on halting North Korea's nuclear abilities

By Glenn Frankel
The Washington Post

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Also yesterday, a U.S. nuclear expert who recently visited North Korea's main nuclear facility said that although he was not allowed to see enough to make a judgment on the country's nuclear-weapons capability, he said the North Koreans "most likely" have the ability at the Yongbyon nuclear site to make plutonium metal.

The report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies warned that time is running out on diplomatic efforts to halt the Pyongyang government's nuclear program while it remains relatively small.

"What we're saying is in the near-term immediate future, North Korea's ability to increase its nuclear arsenal is very limited," said Gary Samore, the report's principal author, who was senior director for nonproliferation and export controls at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.

"But as you go beyond that window, it really begins to get into the range of dozens of nuclear weapons," he added during a press briefing.

The institute's 120-page report cautioned that it was impossible to know for certain how many nuclear bombs, if any, North Korea possessed. But based upon previous assessments and the assumption that the country's nuclear weapons would use a simple implosion-type fission device, the study said it was "plausible" North Korea had acquired enough plutonium to build one or two bombs before it suspended its nuclear program in the early 1990s.

After North Korea ousted international inspectors and resumed its nuclear activities in 2002, the report said, the country's ability to manufacture more nuclear weapons depended on whether North Korean officials were truthful in their claims that they had reprocessed nearly 8,000 spent fuel rods from one of two reactors.

The report said the fuel rods could provide 25 to 30 kilograms of plutonium, enough to build two to five nuclear bombs.

At present, the report stated, North Korea's capability to produce fresh plutonium is limited to its functioning 5-megawatt reactor, which it restarted in February 2002. The reactor could produce enough plutonium for one new bomb a year.

But completion of a second 50-megawatt reactor under construction could produce 55 kilograms more of plutonium each year, according to the study, and a new centrifuge-enrichment plant could add 75 more kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Altogether, these substances could provide eight to 13 bombs a year.

The United States has been seeking to persuade North Korea to scrap its nuclear program, although the Bush administration and its diplomatic partners in China, Russia, Japan and South Korea are divided over the extent of the program and over whether positive incentives or economic and political pressure might work best.

Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos, N.M., nuclear-research lab who recently visited North Korea's main nuclear facility, said yesterday he saw no convincing evidence that the North Koreans could use plutonium metal to build a nuclear device. And even if they had that capability, he said he saw no proof the North Koreans could convert such a device into a nuclear weapon.

Hecker went to North Korea with several U.S. colleagues on an unofficial visit two weeks ago.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hecker said "It would be just not smart to assume they can't make a rudimentary weapon."

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