SEOUL, April 18: North Korea dramatically raised the stakes in its nuclear standoff with the United States on Friday by saying it was “successfully reprocessing” more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that could be used in atomic bombs.
In Washington, a US official said the Pyongyang announcement had put in jeopardy next week’s planned talks between US, North Korean and Chinese diplomats in Beijing.
The official said no decision had yet been made on how to proceed, but appeared to contradict a senior State Department official who said earlier that the talks would go ahead as planned.
Just days before the first formal talks with North Korea in the six-month-old nuclear crisis, North Korea’s foreign ministry said the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had taught Pyongyang “it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent force”.
“As we have already declared, we are successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase, as we sent interim information to the U.S. and other countries concerned early in March after resuming our nuclear activities from December last year,” a ministry spokesman said.
The comments, published by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), gave no details on the reprocessing — which could give the North enough material for several atomic bombs.
The news came as Japan, South Korea and the United States discussed the crisis in Washington before the Beijing talks.
North Korea, which has in the past raised the stakes ahead of important negotiations as a negotiating tactic, has never publicly stated it had begun reprocessing and it was not clear when and to whom the purported declaration was made.
There was no immediate comment from the United States, which has spy satellites that can detect activity at the Yongbyon nuclear complex where the reprocessing plant is located.
South Korea said it had seen no sign North Korea was reprocessing nuclear fuel rods.
“According to our intelligence, there is no sign that North Korea has begun reprocessing fuel rods,” Lee Jihyun, presidential spokeswoman for the foreign media, said.
“We did not receive any official information from North Korea in March,” Lee added. Japan also said it had not been notified by the North. Russia’s foreign ministry declined comment.
The North’s statement did not refer to extracting weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods, which are stored at Yongbyon, where a reactor has already been restarted.
The spent fuel rods could be used to make five or six nuclear bombs and reprocessing them would be the most provocative of many escalatory steps North Korea has taken since the nuclear dispute flared up last October, experts say.
NORTH NOTES TALKS: The statement also acknowledged for the first time expected three-way talks with the United States and China in Beijing next week to discuss the nuclear impasse.
“We would like to confirm the U.S. intention in the forthcoming talks,” the statement said.
The nuclear standoff began in October when the United States said the North had admitted it had an active covert programme to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear arms, in addition to a plutonium programme frozen under a 1994 pact between North Korea and the United States.
Earlier on Friday, South Korea’s new ambassador to the United States said the negotiations set to begin next week would be an “arduous, long process”.
“This is not going to be a cakewalk,” said Han Sung-joo, who was South Korea’s foreign minister during the previous Korean nuclear crisis.
Han said Pyongyang was now much closer to having nuclear arms and Washington’s security thinking had changed dramatically since the September 11 attacks.—Reuters\AFP
