N. Korea Plans to Reopen Nuclear Power Facilities

The United States and North Korea marched toward a diplomatic crisis Thursday when the isolated Communist regime said it would reopen shuttered nuclear power facilities and asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to remove monitoring cameras and seals from all of its nuclear facilities.

If implemented, the move would make it more difficult for the international community to know whether North Korea was tapping into its plutonium stockpiles to make nuclear weapons. The CIA has estimated that North Korea already has one or two nuclear devices and could make many more by mid-decade if it used the plutonium at the facilities.

“We view this as a very serious matter,” a senior U.S. administration official said late Thursday. “We regret North Korea has decided to make this request. We are consulting with the IAEA and other countries, and we hope North Korea reconsiders their request.”

The North Korean announcement came on the heels of the seizure and subsequent release of a ship carrying North Korean-made Scud missiles to Yemen, a move that the regime in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, called “unpardonable piracy that wantonly encroached upon” its sovereignty.

The regime said that its hand was forced by a decision last month by the United States and its allies to suspend donations of fuel oil to the power-starved nation. The fuel-oil deliveries, which were cut off after North Korea admitted to a secret uranium-enrichment program, were part of a 1994 agreement that required Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions in exchange for energy assistance.

“With the United States abandoning its responsibility, we now face a discrepancy in our electricity generation plan,” said a statement attributed to an unnamed North Korean Foreign Ministry official, who was quoted by the official Korean Central News Agency. As a result, North Korea said it would “immediately resume operation and construction of nuclear facilities.”

North Korea did not go so far Thursday as to order the IAEA staff at the sprawling Yongbyon nuclear complex in question to leave.

But the demand to remove the monitoring equipment was seen as especially troubling because it would make it difficult to know whether North Korea was opening any of the 8,000 sealed and canned spent fuel rods at the facility and extracting or reprocessing the plutonium.

Washington’s reaction was relatively mild Thursday until it heard about North Korea’s demand to remove the cameras from the nuclear facilities.

“The dangerous thing about the request to remove the cameras is, it comes pretty close to a clear admission that they are indeed doing illicit activities,” said North Korea expert L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington.

“If you’re not doing anything wrong ... why do you care about the cameras?”

IAEA head Mohammed Baradei sent a letter back Thursday urging North Korea “to act with restraint in this tense situation and not to take any unilateral action” that would make it difficult for IAEA inspectors to continue monitoring the North Korean facilities.

Baradei also asked North Korea to agree to an urgent meeting of technical experts to discuss monitoring.

North Korea is known for its bold tactics in clamoring for international attention -- and the Bush administration for its refusal to compromise with Pyongyang.

“It’s brinkmanship, plain and simple,” Flake said, adding, “I am increasingly alarmed that [the Bush] administration won’t blink.”

Retired Col. William M. Drennan, a Korea expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, said of the North Koreans: “It’s not that they’re genetically incapable of backing down, though it is rare.... They will back down if they calculate it is their interest to do that.”

Cho Myong Chul, a prominent North Korean defector who now works as an economist in Seoul, said that the North Koreans appear to be prodding the Bush administration toward a crisis sooner rather than later with the calculation that they will have more bargaining power when the United States is preoccupied with Iraq.”If they wait for the U.S. attack on Iraq to be completed, their room to maneuver will not be as effective,” Cho said. “North Korea is clearly very upset, but they are calculating as well. I think they will want to negotiate. They will not start opening the reactor tomorrow.”

“Their objective is to get us to negotiate with them,” agreed Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in Washington, noting that the North Koreans know the United States is preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan. “They know right now that we don’t want to think about them more than necessary, and not talk to them for a while.... And here is their one way of saying ... ‘You have to deal with us now.’ ”

North Korea’s nuclear ambitions precipitated a serious diplomatic crisis with the U.S. in 1994, which ended in that year’s deal, known as the Agreed Framework.

Under the agreement, North Korea would freeze its nuclear facilities and allow IAEA monitoring; Japan and the European Union would pay for construction of two new, less proliferation-prone light-water nuclear reactors for North Korea; and the United States would supply fuel oil to the energy-starved nation for the time it would take to build the plant. But the Agreed Framework is now unraveling.

A major point of concern is the Yongbyon complex, 55 miles north of Pyongyang. The complex contains a 5-megawatt, Soviet-designed nuclear reactor that is too small to generate significant quantities of power but was nevertheless capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.

South Korean sources said it could be restarted in perhaps two months, although other analysts expressed doubt that the rusty, obsolete plant would work. Even if it was fired up and connected to North Korea’s fragile power grid, the plant would produce an insignificant amount of electricity -- nowhere near enough to help the country endure its cold winter.

“But it can produce plutonium,” an IAEA official said.

Spent fuel rods from that plant have been monitored by the IAEA since 1994. At the time of the freeze, the North Koreans had two other nuclear plants that were under construction -- a 50-megawatt unit in Yongbyon and a 200-megawatt unit in Taechon that would be large enough to supply electricity to the power-starved nation.

It would take North Korea two years to finish construction on the two larger reactors, said the IAEA official, who asked not to be named.

The need for energy to replace the suspended fuel oil shipments does not explain North Korea’s demand for restarting or removing monitoring equipment at the plutonium reprocessing facility, which does not produce energy. That move was instantly understood in Washington, Seoul and Vienna, where the IAEA is based, as a shot across the bow of the Bush administration.

“The North Koreans have been muddling the last two months without doing anything but throwing out rhetoric against the United States.... Now they are really angry,” said Kim Tae Woo, an analyst at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.

Before the North Koreans demanded the removal of monitoring equipment, the Bush administration apparently had concluded that it would let the North Koreans stew in their own juices in the hope that leader Kim Jong Il would realize that the Bush administration would not give in, as it had accused the Clinton administration of doing.

Earlier Thursday, National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said the North’s declaration on resuming nuclear operations was “regrettable,” but he repeated language designed to reassure Kim that the U.S. is not about to attack and holding out the promise of better relations if the North gives up its nuclear ambitions.

“As the president has said, we have no intentions of invading the DPRK,” the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, McCormack said, using the formal name of the North. “The international community has made it clear that North Korea’s relations with the outside world hinge on the elimination of its nuclear weapons program.

“The U.S. has always been open to dialogue in principle and was prepared for a comprehensive approach to improving U.S.-DPRK relations before the disclosure of the DPRK’s clandestine uranium-enrichment program,” McCormack added. “However, the U.S. will not enter into dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has signed.”

Today, the North’s Foreign Ministry demanded an apology from the U.S. for seizing the missile-laden ship and said it had a right to produce missiles and export them for profit.

“The United States should apologize ... and duly compensate for all the mental and material damage done to the ship and its crew,” it said in a statement reported by the KCNA.

The ship was “carrying missile components and some building materials” under a legal contract with Yemen, it said, adding that the North “has already clarified that it is not only producing missiles to defend itself from the U.S. ... but exporting them to earn foreign currency.”

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage dismissed the demand. “An unflagged, stateless ship carrying contraband cargo, we had every right to stop it,” he told reporters during a visit to Sydney. “We searched it, we found the papers in disorder, established this fact for the whole world and then let the shipment continue, so I find the statement absurd.”

Although analysts of North Korea commended the Bush administration’s general consistency and unity in its message to North Korea, many worried whether it was going far enough in offering Pyongyang a face-saving opportunity for a negotiated settlement.

“North Korea is not going to capitulate on issues of vital national security for them,” said Joel Wit, a former State Department expert on Korea now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “We do have to be tough with them, but we have to use every measure available to us to resolve the situation. That means at some point we are going to have to sit down with them.”

And while there is time to negotiate, once North Korea fires up its new plants, the U.S. options for a preemptive strike on North Korea become even less palatable than they were in 1994, O’Hanlon said. “Once it gets started, it will be difficult to hit it with a laser-guided bomb because you risk spewing out radioactivity,” he said.

The South Korean government released a statement expressing “strong regret and dismay,” after a three-hour emergency meeting of the country’s National Security Council on Thursday night. The North Korean declaration was also condemned by the South’s two leading candidates for president.

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Demick reported from Seoul, Efron from Washington and Rubin from Tel Aviv.