CBS News reports that North Korea's claim of a new, highly sophisticated uranium enrichment facility could be a ploy to win concessions in nuclear talks or an attempt to bolster leader Kim Jong Il's apparent heir.
But whatever the reason for the revelation, which a seasoned American nuclear scientist called "stunning," it provides a new set of worries for the Obama administration, which is sending its special envoy on North Korea for talks with officials in South Korea, Japan and China this week.
The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted Saturday that he was taken during a recent trip to the North's main Yongbyon atomic complex to a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility.
It had 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, he said, and the North told him it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor. Hecker, a former director of the U.S. Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory who is regularly given rare glimpses of the North's secretive nuclear program, said the program had been built in secret and with remarkable speed. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said uranium enrichment activities would violate U.N. resolutions and agreements by North Korea over its nuclear program.
"From my perspective, it's North Korea continuing on a path which is destabilizing for the region. It confirms or validates the concern we've had for years about their enriching uranium," Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, said on CNN's "State of the Union." "The Obama administration is limited in its options, since U.N. sanctions have not succeeded in freezing North Korean nuclear programs," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, who is based at the U.N., "and although North Korea's revelation of its nuclear facilities overhaul appears to have been timed for President Obama's Asia trip (since the visit by U.S. nuclear scientists took place earlier this month), the news nonetheless set off alarms for the Obama administration, which had been monitoring the developments."
The Obama administration has shunned direct negotiations with North Korea following its nuclear and missile tests last year and in the wake of an international finding that a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.
The North Koreans, Falk says, "appear to be looking for the U.S. to restart direct talks, while the U.S. and South Korea are beginning negotiations to resume the six-party talks which include China, Japan, and Russia."
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