SEOUL, Dec 23: North Korea ratcheted up tension in the Korean peninsula’s nuclear crisis on Monday, ignoring international condemnation by removing UN seals at a laboratory suspected of being used to produce weapons-grade material.
A source close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the North had started stripping the nuclear watchdog’s seals and monitoring equipment from the laboratory at Yongbyon.
The lab is suspected of having reprocessed fuel rods for weapons-grade plutonium before its activities were frozen under a 1994 arms control deal with the United Sates.
“North Koreans are cutting the seals of the nuclear fuel reprocessing laboratory,” the source, who is fully informed of the UN nuclear watchdog (IAEA) activities in the North, said.
“They could complete it possibly by tomorrow.”
The move followed similar actions at the Yongbyon nuclear facility over the weekend, which saw North Korea take control of thousands of spent fuel rods that could be used to make nuclear weapons.
The United States responded to that development with swift condemnation.
“The 8,000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular concern because they can be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons,” US State Department spokesman Louis Fintor said.
Earlier on Monday, the nuclear crisis dominated the first meeting between South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung and president-elect Roh Moo-Hyun, meeting for the first time since Roh’s election last week.
The meeting was supposed to focus on smoothing over the Feb 25 transfer of power between the outgoing and incoming leaders.
Instead the 90-minute talks centred on Pyongyang’s latest standoff with the international community.
“Their discussion was pinned down on international relations which focused on North Korea’s nuclear issue,” President Kim’s spokeswoman Park Sun-Sook said.
South Korea’s frustration with the North was evident in a foreign ministry statement which urged Pyongyang to restore the seals and disabled monitoring cameras on the rods.
“Despite repeated warnings from our government and the international community, North Korea took further actions to unfreeze its nuclear activities, raising regional tension and amplifying international concerns over nuclear proliferation,” the statement said.
The United States has been stepping up international pressure on North Korea since the weekend.
Deputy US Ambassador Evans Revere met South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Tai-Sik in Seoul Monday to discuss countermeasures to be taken against the North following their foreign ministers’ urgent talks over the phone.
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi also expressed widespread international alarm about Pyongyang’s “regrettable” latest move.
Russia also “regrets North Korea’s unilateral action in dismantling the instruments of control” over the lab, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.
US Senator Richard Lugar, who will head the Senate’s foreign relations committee next year, said North Korea was creating “a very dangerous situation, initially for South Korea and for Japan but ultimately for the United States.”
Analysts have said North Korea could extract some 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of weapons-grade plutonium for at least three nuclear weapons from the irradiated rods.
Pyongyang said it unfroze its nuclear facilities because it was in a desperate energy crisis aggravated by the suspension of fuel oil shipments, but Washington said the spent fuel has nothing to do with power generation.
The United States and North Korea came close to war over Pyongyang’s plutonium program in the early 1990s. The confrontation was defused when Washington and Pyongyang signed the 1994 Agreed Framework.
But the accord has been unravelling since the US announcement in October that Pyongyang has admitted to running a new, secret and separate programme based on enriched uranium.
In retaliation, Washington cut its fuel aid to Pyongyang.—AFP