North Korea threatens to restart nuclear reactor

Seoul, South Korea: North Korea said Tuesday that it would put all its nuclear facilities - including its operational uranium-enrichment program and its reactors mothballed or under construction - to use in expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal, sharply raising the stakes in the standoff with the United States and its allies. The announcement by the North's General Department of Atomic Energy came two days after the country's leader, Kim Jong Un, said his nuclear weapons were not a bargaining chip and called for expanding his country's nuclear arsenal in "quality and quantity" during a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea. The decision will affect the role of the North's uranium-enrichment plant in the North's main nuclear complex in Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, a spokesman for the nuclear department told the Korean Central News Agency. This was the first time that North Korea said that it would use the facility to make nuclear weapons. Since first unveiling it to a visiting US scholar in 2010, North Korea had insisted that it was running the plant to make reactor fuel to generate electricity, although Washington suggested its purpose was to make bombs. Saying "we will act on this without delay," the spokesman also said that North Korea will restart its mothballed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. The five-megawatt graphite-moderated reactor had been the main source of plutonium bomb fuel for North Korea until it was shut down under a short-lived nuclear disarmament deal with Washington in 2007. North Korean engineers were believed to have extracted enough plutonium for six to eight bombs - including the devices detonated in 2006 and 2009 in underground nuclear tests - from the spent fuel unloaded from the reactor. It is unknown whether North Korea's third nuclear test in February used some of its limited stockpile of plutonium or used fuel from its uranium-enrichment program, whose scale and history remain a mystery. A restarting of the reactor and weapons-producing role for its uranium-enrichment plant would add to growing US concern over the North's nuclear weapons program. The developments would mean that the North would now have two sources of fuel for atomic bombs - plutonium and highly enriched uranium - and could become more strident in demands. In Beijing, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Hong Lei, said that China, the North's main ally, felt "regretful" about the North's announcement. "We have noticed the statement made by the DPRK and feel regretful about it," Hong said Tuesday at a daily briefing to reporters. China urged "all parties to remain calm and restrained," he said. In Kim's speech before the party meeting, the script of which was published in the North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Tuesday, he said that making the country's possession of self-defence nuclear weapons "permanent" was essential to ensuring that the country could focus on rebuilding its economy. "Now that we have become a proud nuclear state, we have gained a favourable ground from which we can concentrate all our finance and efforts in building the economy and improving the people's lives based on the strong deterrent against war," Kim said. "We must now focus all our resources on building an economically strong nation." Moving swiftly upon the party's "new strategic line," the country's atomic energy department said that measures were being taken to expand the North's nuclear deterrent, as well as to build an indigenous nuclear power industry to resolve the country's acute electricity shortage. The North's rubber-stamp Parliament, the Supreme People's Republic, enacted a new law Monday on "consolidating the position of nuclear weapons state," official media reported Tuesday. North Korea "shall take practical steps to bolster up the nuclear deterrence and nuclear retaliatory strike power both in quality and quantity to cope with the gravity of the escalating danger of the hostile forces' aggression and attack," the law said. It also said North Korea shall cooperate for "nuclear non-proliferation," depending on "the improvement of relations with hostile nuclear weapons states." The North's new party line removed any lingering "ambiguity" over what North Korea might try to do with its nuclear weapons, said a senior South Korean government official, who briefed a group of foreign reporters on President Park Geun-hye's policy on North Korea on condition that he remain unnamed. "We now know their real intention. The picture is clear. What we will do is the combined will of the international community," he said, adding that Seoul, Washington and their allies must employ "all means" of pressure on North Korea, including not only economic sanctions but also investigations into the North's human rights abuses. "They are depending on nuclear weapons for their survival, but we must persuade them that there is an alternative and brinkmanship doesn't work." North Korea demolished the cooling tower of the old Soviet-era five-megawatt reactor in 2008 to demonstrate its commitment to the 2007 deal with Washington. In return, the US State Department removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. The deal, however, unravelled over differences in nuclear inspections between Washington and the North. And the North has since been making preparations to restart it as well as building a new reactor in Yongbyon, though officials here said the country was still months, if not years, from getting the old, decrepit reactor on line again. More worrisome to them is uranium enrichment. North Korea publicly acknowledged enriching uranium in 2009, but US officials had suspected enrichment activity in the North as early as 2002. They fear that the enrichment plant unveiled in 2010 may likely be only part of a much bigger, harder-to-detect and more sustainable program to make nuclear bomb fuel. North Korea is rich in uranium ores. Unlike the plutonium program, which included a large and easily spotted nuclear reactor, an enrichment plant composed of 1,000 centrifuges occupies a 60-square-meter space, small enough to be hidden in one of the estimated 8,000 tunnels that North Korea has dug for military purposes across its mountainous terrain, South Korean military officials said. © 2013, The New York Times News Service