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Nkorea ready produce nuclear weapons { July 15 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/3987868.htmlhttp://www.startribune.com/stories/484/3987868.html
North Korea says it's ready to produce nuclear weapons
David E. Sanger, New York Times
Published July 15, 2003 NKOR15
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to create at least six nuclear devices and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior U.S. officials said on Monday.
The new declaration set off a scramble inside U.S. intelligence agencies -- under fire for their assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability -- to determine whether the government of Kim Jong-il is bluffing or had actually succeeded in producing the material without being detected.
Officials said Monday that the answer is unclear. A preliminary set of atmospheric tests for the presence of a gas given off as nuclear waste is reprocessed into plutonium is the best indicator the United States has to work with from one of the world's most closed nations. The most recent tests suggested that nuclear work has accelerated, but the results were inconclusive. More test results are expected at the end of this week.
North Korea had said in April that it was working to convert its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium. Several months ago, U.S. spy satellites recorded the rods being hauled away from a storage shed, although it is unclear where they were taken.
North Korea's latest declaration, if true, would pose a direct challenge to President Bush, who said two months ago that a nuclear-armed North Korea "will not be tolerated."
Bush will be faced with difficult choices. He decided it was too risky to take military action against the North's main nuclear reprocessing plant, at Yongbyon, even before the reprocessing started. Now, though, the Pentagon may be asked to revisit the military options that Bush has always said are a last resort.
But the president must also decide whether to negotiate with the North -- under its implicit nuclear threat -- or hold fast to his insistence that any talks must include the entire region and that nuclear blackmail would be met with increasingly harsh sanctions.
Intelligence agencies have scant evidence that the North is actually building a nuclear weapon, officials said. As recently as two weeks ago, U.S. intelligence officials told South Korea and Japan that they they believed that, at most, only a few hundred of the rods had been converted into weapons-usable material. Then they warned that North Korea was experimenting with the conventional explosives that are needed to ignite a nuclear explosion -- further evidence of its intent to produce weapons. The CIA believes the North may have produced two weapons in the early 1990s, but the evidence is in dispute.
The North's latest declaration came July 8 in New York, during an unannounced meeting between North Korean diplomats at the United Nations and Jack Pritchard, a state department official who handles North Korea issues.
The North Korean diplomats read a statement from Pyongyang declaring that the reprocessing of the rods had been completed on June 30.
The North Korean officials then said that weapons production was beginning. "They didn't say how long it would take, and they didn't threaten to sell anything," said one senior official.
Some see last week's declaration as a negotiating ploy, but other officials believe that the Kim government has simply decided that it can make Washington and its Asian neighbors accept the North as a new nuclear power.
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