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Surprise! North Korea Unveils a Huge New Uranium Plant [Updated] from Danger Room by Spencer Ackerman
As if the possible collapse of the Obama administration’s nuclear-arms treaty with Russia wasn’t bad enough. North Korea just unveiled a new facility for enriching uranium, possibly for nuclear bombs, all as talks to disarm the rogue state are practically dead.
Earlier this month, North Korean officials invited a former Los Alamos National Laboratories director, Siegfried S. Hecker, to its Yongbyon nuclear complex, the major installation in the north’s nuclear apparatus. They were eager to show him an “ultra-modern and clean” uranium-enrichment facility with “2,000 centrifuges… said to be producing low enriched uranium” for a new, 25 to 30 megawatt-electric light-water reactor. Those facilities “could be readily converted to produce highly-enriched uranium (HEU) bomb fuel (or parallel facilities could exist elsewhere).”
The U.S. has known about North Korea’s switch from plutonium bombs to an effort at producing weapons from highly-enriched uranium since 2002. But over the past several years, U.S. intelligence has cast doubt on the North’s ability to successfully enrich uranium, as Pyongyang’s bombs have relied on old-school, less-powerful plutonium for their potency. “The 2,000-centrifuge capability significantly exceeds my estimates and that of most other analysts,” Hecker writes. Suddenly the North may have a viable option to a second type of nuke.
This new facility has been built in barely a year, suggesting a big crash program to build more-powerful bombs than the plutonium ones currently in the North’s arsenal — even while United Nations sanctions against the North have grown more severe. And that might indicate Yongbyon is just the tip of the iceberg in a uranium program that the international community didn’t detect. “To outfit a plant with 2,000 centrifuges this quickly suggests that this may not be the first gas centrifuge plant that North Korea has built,” blogged David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security, a leading nuclear-security think tank. “It is possible that North Korea built another plant previously and either transferred it to Yongbyon or simply built another one based on its experience of bringing the first, perhaps smaller, one into operation.”
If there’s any silver lining, Hacker writes that Yongbyon’s plutonium facilities are still being dismantled, cold comfort as that may be.
Hecker and a colleague heard that the North set up the light-water reactor after the U.S. and the North’s neighbors failed to sufficiently bribe it into disarming with heavy fuel for electricity generation. “We are willing to proceed with the Six-Party Talks and the September 19, 2005 agreement, but we cannot wait for a positive agreement,” Hecker writes the plant’s senior technical adviser told him. “We are trying our best to solve our own problems. We will convert our center to a [light-water reactor] and pilot enrichment facility. It is a high priority to develop uranium enrichment.”
The reactor is supposed to be completed by 2012, but Hecker calls that “unreasonably optimistic.” North Korean officials also claimed that they’re already producing low-enriched uranium at Yongbyon, but Hacker couldn’t verify that.
There’s been lots of speculation in the Korean and Japanese press recently that the North is about to attempt its third bomb test since 2006. An imagery analyst at Jane’s told Global Security Newswire that there have been “notable signs of excavation” at the site of the North’s first nuclear test. All this comes months after the North torpedoed a South Korean ship, killing its crew of 46 sailors, and while successor-in-waiting Kim Jong-un appears to be ridding the ruling communist party of possible rivals.
The New York Times reports that the Obama administration has sent envoys to Russia, China, Japan and South Korea to plan what to do about the new uranium-enrichment plant. It wants China, North Korea’s major patron, to exercise its economic leverage over the North, as international sanctions have clearly failed to dissuade Pyongyang from moving forward with uranium enrichment.
Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, one of the most prominent anti-proliferation think tanks in Washington, blogged on Sunday that the new North Korean enrichment facility could represent “another nuclear proliferation tipping point.” Kimball urged Obama to restart talks with the North and “outline, again and in detail, the security assurances, trade benefits, and energy support that the U.S. and other regional allies would be prepared to provide if North Korea once again halted its nuclear and missile programs, ended its proliferation behavior, and dismantled its nuclear complex.”
Like Hecker, Albright and Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security feared that a lot of the North’s uranium-enrichment work is hidden in secrecy. “[A] centrifuge plant does not exist in a vacuum,” they wrote. “It is still unknown where North Korea researches, develops, and manufactures centrifuges.” But they speculate that the U.S. may have a new weapon in its arsenal to use against the facility: “It is possible that the North Korean plant(s) could be vulnerable to the Stuxnet worm.”
Update, 8:45 p.m.: On the Sunday-show circuit, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, didn’t exactly say that U.S. intelligence was caught flat-footed by the new uranium facility. But he gestured in that direction: “This is something we’ve been concerned about for a significant period of time,” Mullen said, “and also penetration of — of the North Koreans, in terms of intelligence capabilities, is very, very difficult.” Other U.S. officials denied any such intelligence lapse to reporters on Sunday.
Likewise, Defense Secretary Robert Gates
Photo: Institute for Science and International Security
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