U.S. sees N. Korea plant as step toward nuclear arms

Senior U.S. defense officials said Sunday that the revelation of North Korea's new uranium-enrichment facility confirmed long-standing suspicions that the country was seeking a second route to build atomic weapons. They dismissed the North's claim that it was simply trying to build nuclear-power plants that it had never been able to obtain from the West.

The Obama administration has dispatched a team of experts to Asian capitals to report that North Korea appears to have started a program to enrich uranium after North Korea told two visiting U.S. experts earlier this month that it possessed such a program and showed them a facility where it claimed the enrichment was taking place.

The claim of the facility's existence — made to Siegfried Hecker, the former chief of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and former U.S. government analyst Robert Carlin — complicates the Obama administration's efforts to counter nuclear proliferation around the globe. It also raises questions about North Korea's motivations in announcing the presence of the plant as it undertakes a leadership transition from leader Kim Jong Il, apparently to his third son, Kim Jong Un.

The North Koreans told Hecker that the facility — located at Yongbyon, where North Korea once had a program to isolate plutonium for nuclear weapons — was for the low-enriched uranium generally used in power plants, according to David Albright, the director of the Institute for Science and International Security, which has monitored North Korea's nuclear programs for years.

But Albright said he thinks the program could be used to produce weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium. So far, North Korea's nuclear arsenal has used plutonium recovered from spent nuclear-reactor fuel rods, the other way to obtain weapons-grade fissile material.

In October, Albright's group reported that North Korea "has moved beyond laboratory-scale work" and is capable of building a "pilot plant" of centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Asked in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where he was on an official visit, whether he believed the North's story that it was producing only low-enriched uranium that could not be used in nuclear weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't credit that at all." He argued that the new facility, once it was operating, could enable North Korea to build "a number" of nuclear devices beyond the eight to 12 they now are presumed to have.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on ABC's "This Week" that for a decade the United States had believed that the North wanted to "head in the direction of additional nuclear weapons."

The report may suggest that a foreign government aided the North in the rapid installation of what appeared to be 2,000 centrifuges, the machines that spin at high speeds to enrich uranium.

The centrifuges appear similar in design to those used at Natanz, the Iranian nuclear-fuel-production site, but North Korea described them as higher-efficiency machines.

The new plant's modernistic technology, rich collection of centrifuges and up-to-date control room, which Hecker said were astonishing, did not exist in the spring of 2009, just before international weapons inspectors were evicted from the country.

While North Korea already has tested two atomic bombs and produced other nuclear weapons, those were made from the spent fuel harvested from a nuclear reactor, not from enriched uranium.