By Chico Harlan, Updated: Tuesday, April 2, 8:58 AM
SEOUL — North Korea said Tuesday that it will resume operations of a shuttered nuclear reactor at its Yongbyon facility, allowing the secretive nation to potentially expand its stock of fissile material for nuclear weapons as it threatens war against the United States and its allies.
The brief announcement, carried by the state-run news agency, marked a notable escalation from the rhetoric of recent weeks, which has been fiery but until now backed up by little action.
The graphite-moderated reactor — along with several related facilities — had been shut down in 2007 as part of a diplomatic deal that sent heavy fuel oil to the North. Pyongyang said Tuesday it wanted to to restart the reactor and other nuclear facilities to ease the nation’s “acute shortage of electricity” and to bolster the “nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity.” Experts who have visited the Yongbyon facility say the small reactor is ill-suited for power production and geared instead to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Plutonium can be culled from the spent fuel that is a byproduct of the reactor’s generating process. When the reactor is fully running, it can produce enough plutonium for about one bomb per year, according to atomic experts.
Restarting the reactor will take about six months, “unless they have been doing much of the preparatory work quietly,” Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has visited the North’s nuclear facilities numerous times, said in an e-mail.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday he was “deeply troubled” by rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula and called for negotiations to resolve them.
“Nuclear threats are not a game,” he said at a news conference during a visit to Andorra. “Aggressive rhetoric and military posturing only result in counteractions and fuel fear and instability. Things must begin to calm down, as this situation, made worse by the lack of communication, could lead down a path that nobody should want to follow.”
Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, said there was “no need” for North Korea “to be on a collision course with the international community.” He said he was sure that no nation intends to attack the North “because of disagreements about its political system or foreign policy. But he expressed fear “that others will respond firmly to any direct military provocation.” Ban added, “Dialogue and negotiations are the only way to resolve the current crisis.”
The North’s announcement comes in the wake of a Workers’ Party pledge that described nuclear weapons as the “nation’s life,” tradable not even for “billions of dollars.” The announcement also suggests that new leader Kim Jong Un is willing to expand his nation’s weapons program even if it upsets neighbors, including the North’s key benefactor, China, whose Foreign Ministry expressed “regret” about the decision to resume operations at Yongbyon.
A former U.S. official who has visited Yongbyon, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak frankly, said the North’s apparent decision is “very dangerous,” because the facilities are not monitored by outsiders.
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