North Korea sends nuclear warning

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North Korea sends nuclear warning


The visitors were told all the spent rods had been reprocessed
Pyongyang has reportedly told the US to make a deal or North Korea will spend the interim developing nuclear arms.
The warning was delivered to an unofficial team from the United States visiting the Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

"Time is not on the US side," a member of team, Charles "Jack" Pritchard, says he was told.

But the former US state department official said there was no way to verify North Korean claims of advances in its "nuclear deterrent".

Mr Pritchard's comments are the first lengthy public statements by any of the five men who were taken to visit North Korea's secret nuclear complex earlier this month.

While the visit was deemed "unofficial", team members have close links to the US Government and the move was seen as significant.

The US believes North Korea is likely to have one or two nuclear weapons and may be trying to develop more.

Washington, in concert with a number of Asian powers, wants to stop the development of what Pyongyang calls a "deterrent".

They are also trying to prevent the possibility of weapons or technology being exported.

Both sides say they want a solution but six-party talks launched last year have not resumed.

Rods 'reprocessed'

The US experts spent several days in North Korea and visited Yongbyon, the first foreigners to do so since UN inspectors were thrown out and the plant reactivated over a year ago.


Charles "Jack" Pritchard held official talks with North Korea in 2002
Mr Pritchard said he was told by the Vice-Foreign Minister, Kim Kye-gwan: "Time is not on the US side. Lapses of time will result in quantitative and qualitative increases in our nuclear deterrent."

Mr Pritchard, addressing an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the team was shown an empty holding pond where 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods had once been kept.

He said he was told all the rods had been reprocessed, allowing scientists to make plutonium bombs, but said he had no way to verify the claims.

Other members of the team, such as the former head of the US nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos, might be able to make better technical assessments, he said.

Mr Pritchard, part of an official state department visit to Pyongyang in October 2002, said he also still believed US intelligence that North Korea had a second nuclear programme involving enriched uranium, though his hosts told him that was not true.

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Journal article by Jae-Jung; Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 28, 1996

by Jae-Jung Suh

With the eleventh-hour agreement between Washington and Pyongyang in October 1994, the security roller coaster named the North Korean nuclear crisis seems to have slowed to a halt—at least for now. Ever since 1989 when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made public its suspicion about North Korea's nuclear program, the nuclear crisis has taken numerous turns, raising or dashing hopes for a peaceful settlement. The crisis brought the region and the United States to the brink of war at times of escalating threats and counterthreats, alternately slowing down to a virtual resolution at numerous negotiating tables. Although a final accounting is still premature, a careful analysis of the crisis is crucial as efforts continue to permanently dismantle the nuclear roller coaster.

One of the essential characteristics of the crisis, which made the ride all the more dizzying, is that no one is sure about the nature and extent of the imbroglio. There have been many estimates and assessments of North Korea's nuclear program, but facts have remained sketchy and rudimentary. Rarely has there been any consensus among the players involved in the situation, and uncertainty-fed fears have complicated the issue, raising the. degree of uncertainty. 1

The uncertainty has been compounded by the degree to which the crisis itself has been constituted by U.S. security managers' needs to have an "enemy" in the post-Cold War world. If the North Korean nuclear issue had some inherent uncertainty, its escalation to fear and crisis was not warranted by the nature of the uncertainty itself. The crisis was, rather, conout of the perception of a definite and imminent threat that North Korea was said to present. The emergency mood reflected less the "reality" of North Korea's nuclear capability than that of post-Cold War power struggles within the United States and its allies to define a new world order: a new alignment between friends and enemies. Through construction of the "other" in the image of the nuclear Soviet Union, the Cold War establishment has thus far managed to preserve itself in a radically transformed world that could have dealt a fatal blow to its existence. It is almost as if the specter of the North Korean "nuclear menace" was summoned up to compensate for all the changes that the end of the Cold War represented so the new world might remain the same as the old one.

This article tackles the uncertainty, particularly the uncertainties surrounding North Korea's will and capacity for nuclear weapons production, and attempts to analyze the North Korean "nuclear threat." An ocean of ink has been spilt over the subject, but, as will be seen, most writings don't even raise a question about some of the core assumptions. It is here suggested that the unsuspecting acceptance these assumptions has helped obfuscate and complicate the issue. We need to question the unquestioned to reduce the level of the uncertainties, which then would help formulate a permanent solution to the North Korean "nuclear crisis."

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Korea Peace Conference held in Los Angeles, California, in August 1994. The author wishes to thank the organizers and participants of this conference, and the editors and anonymous readers of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars for their helpful comments.  

1  For a description of differing perceptions of the North Korean nuclear issue among affected parties, see Alvin Z. Rubinstein, "North Korea's Nuclear Challenge", Korea and World Affairs, vol. 18, no. 1 ( spring 1994 ), pp. 23-41. Although he argues that "each of the parties affected has a different assessment of and suggested approach to the situation," it is not just a matter of different opinion. There has indeed been a level of uncertainty about the issue, which has contributed to each party's adopting a different attitude; for a more critical assessment, also see "Notes from the Field:"The Korean Nuclear Crisis, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 26, nos. 1-2 ( Jan.-June 1994 ), pp. 127-46.

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Journal article by Andrew Mack; World Policy Journal, Vol. XI, 1994

Given its security mindset, North Korea's reasons for wanting the bomb are obvious enough:

•  Nuclear weapons would provide a countervailing deterrent against U.S. nuclear threats. These threats still exist in the form of the "nuclear umbrella" held over South Korea--"nuclear umbrella" simply being a polite way of saying that, under certain circumstances, the United States would use nuclear weapons against North Korea.  

•  Nuclear weapons will provide against a future South Korean bomb. The South's attempt to "go nuclear" in the 1970s provided an early incentive for the North's bomb program.  

•  Nuclear weapons will act as a deterrent against the threat the North perceives from the overwhelming conventional military superiority that the South will clearly achieve at some time this decade. Some observers believe that the South is already superior.  

•  Nuclear weapons will compensate the North for the loss of its nuclear ally, Russia.  

•  Nuclear weapons will ensure that North Korea is taken seriously as a major player in the region, even though its economy may be in crisis.