North Korean Economy Watch

Washington Post
By Glenn Kessler
11/10/2007
Page A01

North Korea is providing evidence to the United States aimed at proving that it never intended to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, undermining a key U.S. intelligence finding, South Korean and U.S. officials said this week.

In closely held talks, the North Korean government has granted U.S. experts access to equipment and documents to make its case, in preparation for declaring the extent of its nuclear activities before the end of the year. North Korean officials hope the United States will simultaneously lift sanctions against Pyongyang as the declaration is made.

If North Korea successfully demonstrates that U.S. accusations about the uranium-enrichment program are wrong, it will be a blow to U.S. intelligence and the Bush administration’s credibility.

The U.S. charges of a large-scale uranium program led to the collapse of a Clinton-era agreement that had frozen a North Korean reactor that produced a different nuclear substance — plutonium. That development freed North Korea to use the plutonium route toward gathering the material needed for a nuclear weapon. Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test last year, detonating a plutonium-based device, and has built a plutonium stockpile that experts estimate could yield eight to 10 nuclear weapons.

“They have shown us some things, and we are working it through,” a senior U.S. official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. “We are having a discussion about things. Some explanations make sense; some are a bit of a stretch.”

“This is now in the process of being clarified,” a senior South Korean official said in an interview. “The North Koreans are now ready to prove that they did not intend to make a uranium-enrichment program by importing some materials.”

He said North Korea is attempting to show that the materials it imported — including 150 tons of aluminum tubes from Russia in June 2002 — were intended for conventional weapons programs and other dual-use projects, not for weapons of mass destruction.

The South Korean official said North Korea’s efforts mark an important shift. “In the past, North Korea simply said no,” he said. “Now they are trying to convince us.”

U.S. intelligence first concluded in July 2002 that North Korea had embarked on a large-scale program to produce highly enriched uranium for use in weapons, saying it was constructing a facility that would be fully operational by 2005. “We discovered that, contrary to an agreement they had with the United States, they’re enriching uranium, with a desire of developing a weapon,” President Bush said in a November 2002 news conference.

U.S. officials have also asserted that a senior North Korean official admitted the existence of the program in an October 2002 meeting in Pyongyang between officials from both nations. North Korea later denied that any such admission took place.

After the administration accused Pyongyang of violating a 1994 agreement struck with President Bill Clinton to freeze its plutonium facilities, North Korea ejected U.N. inspectors from the country and restarted its plutonium reactor, allowing it to stockpile its weapons-grade material.

For years afterward, during the impasse over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, the Bush administration insisted that North Korea first admit having the uranium facility, rejecting arguments from other nations that it was more important to freeze the plutonium facility in order to halt the nation’s production. After North Korea tested the nuclear device, the administration agreed to a deal in which Pyongyang froze and then disabled the plutonium facility in exchange for international aid.

Plutonium and highly enriched uranium provide different routes to building nuclear weapons. The North Koreans were able to reprocess 8,000 spent fuel rods — which had been held in a cooling pond and monitored by U.N. inspectors under the 1994 agreement — to acquire the weapons-grade plutonium. A uranium program would have required Pyongyang to build a facility with thousands of centrifuges to obtain the highly enriched uranium needed for a weapon. Iran’s nuclear program, which the United States alleges is intended for weapons, involves enriched uranium.

The administration this year began to back off its earlier assertions that North Korea has an active program to enrich uranium. In February, the chief U.S. intelligence officer for North Korea, Joseph R. DeTrani, told Congress that while there is “high confidence” that North Korea acquired materials that could be used in a “production-scale” uranium program, there is only “mid-confidence” that such a program exists.

David Albright, a former U.N. inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said in a report this year that there is “ample evidence” that North Korea was trying to put together a small-scale research program involving a few dozen centrifuges but that claims of a large-scale effort were flawed.

Albright said yesterday that the tubes acquired by North Korea needed to be cut in half and shaped in order to be used as the outer casings of centrifuges. If Pyongyang proves that the tubes were untouched, he said, it could “shatter the argument” that they were meant for a uranium program.

But Albright said it is difficult to see how North Korea could explain away a set of centrifuges that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said a Pakistani nuclear-smuggling network provided to Pyongyang. “I think the North Koreans are making a big mistake” if they deny they had any interest in uranium enrichment, he said. “They are going to create a lot of trouble if they stick to this.”

Center for Strategic and International Studies
(Hat tip to the Marmot)
Jon B. Wolfsthal
10/17/2007

North Korea has pledged to disable its nuclear facilities by the end of the year, and the United States is sending a team of technical experts to Yongbyon to begin the process of putting Pyongyang’s bomb machine to sleep.

The more lengthy process of dismantling the full complex will come later.

Few Americans have been to the remote and heavily guarded complex. I was one of a group of Department of Energy employees that served as on-site monitors at Yongbyon. And far from the advanced complex depicted in so many James Bond thrillers, what we found were are a collection of crumbling cement structures with inadequate heat and power. The water and electricity work only sporadically. There are no lasers or modern computer complexes with flashing lights; the site is frozen in the 1950s and more closely resembles a junk yard than an evil regime’s nuclear nerve center.

Top on the disablement list is the North’s 5 megawatt nuclear reactor.

Built in the 1980s, the plant is capable of producing up to one bomb’s worth of plutonium every year. The U.S. team will find antiquated computer control equipment scavenged from the international market and cobbled together from so many spare parts. Rusting parts and broken windows dominate the outside view. While safe to visit for short periods, the levels of radiation on the site would force its closure in any state in America. U.S. experts will have to wear nuclear detection equipment, known as dosimeters, at all times for their safety.

The U.S. teams also have to de-activate the fuel reprocessing center where North Korea extracted plutonium from spent nuclear fuel for its nuclear weapons, as well as the fresh fuel production site. The condition of the reprocessing facility is not well known. However, reprocessing spent fuel is among the most radioactive activities there is and levels of radiation are likely to be very high. Only short periods of exposure will be permitted by the U.S. or Korean health physicists tasked with ensuring the health of those working in radioactive environments.

Locking down the fuel fabrication site may be the easiest task due to its poor condition, but will pose some of the greatest health challenges. It is likely that the damage to the site, as well as the standards of safety at the plant, has led to the dispersal of uranium at the site making day to day work difficult and dangerous.

In all three sites, US personnel will have to wear protective clothes, including overalls, masks, surgeon hats, and gloves. Dressing and undressing and being checked for radiation at every entry will take time and will get frustrating very quickly. Just ensuring there are enough sets of protective wear is a major logistics exercise, as most of the equipment needed by the American teams will have to be flown in from outside of the country. There are no Home Depots in North Korea. Ensuring they have the reliable electricity and heat, as well as necessary equipment to carry out their jobs, will take months to arrange and endless hours of haggling with North Korean engineers who will not be enthusiastic about helping the U.S. take apart the nuclear complex they spent their lives building. Even getting basic tools to complete their work will be a challenge.

Aside from the work at hand, the teams will have to face some of the most isolating and demoralizing work conditions anywhere. U.S. teams will literally be behind enemy lines, as the United States and North Korea remain technically in a state of war with each other. U.S. teams will sleep at a guest house guarded by AK-47–toting guards (for their own protection, they will be told). Driven over dirt roads, each morning and evening they will pass through no less than four police and army check points, manned with machine gun nests and humorless North Korean officers. This winter the temperature will reach 20 degrees below zero every night.

Staying warm will be among the first of the challenges the technical teams face. Not losing their minds to boredom will be another. No outside T.V. or communication is possible, as North Korea will likely ban the use of satellite phones for communication with the outside world. Perhaps some of the hundreds of paper back books left by the U.S. government teams who worked there in the 1990s are still on site, but forms of entertainment for their resting hours will be few and far between.

In short, the U.S. experts heading to North Korea are going to a place unlike anywhere else on earth. Rugged and strangely compelling, the high mountains and dirt roads that surround Yongbyon will reinforce a sense of isolation hard to overcome. Only by concentrating on and remembering the importance of the difficult tasks at hand will they be able to maintain their morale and confidence. Any success they achieve will aid the process of disarmament on the Korean peninsula, but their time in country will likely go unnoticed and unappreciated by most. A shame, for their work could not be more important and deserves thanks.