North Korea Disables Surveillance at Reactor

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said Saturday that North Korea has disabled surveillance devices that the agency had placed at a nuclear reactor suspected of being used to make weapons-grade plutonium. The agency expressed “deep regret” at the move and issued a new call for restraint.

Mohammed Baradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he urged the reclusive nation not to take further actions to restart its nuclear program. Baradei said North Korea “cut most of the seals and impeded the functioning of surveillance equipment” at one of its 5-megawatt reactors at Yongbyong.

The secretive Stalinist state said this month it would restart the reactor, which had been closed under a 1994 international agreement. The IAEA, based in Vienna, has been monitoring the freeze of the reactors and other nuclear operations at Yongbyong since 1994.

North Korea pledged to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear arms program in exchange for shipments of oil and the construction of more proliferation-proof reactors. Those facilities have not yet been built, and oil shipments were recently suspended after the North admitted having a secret uranium-based nuclear arms program.

U.S. officials called on the regime in Pyongyang on Saturday to adhere to the 1994 agreement.

“We urge the [North] not to restart its frozen nuclear facilities,” U.S. State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said.

Fintor said Washington was trying to establish exactly what North Korea had done, although it did not appear that Pyongyang had disturbed seals or cameras at a reprocessing plant or at the spent-fuel pond where 8,000 spent-fuel rods were stored.

South Korean officials had a similar message. “North Korea must immediately restore the surveillance equipment,” Foreign Ministry official Shim Yoon Jo said today. “It has been our consistent position that we will not tolerate North Korea’s nuclear activities.”

North Korean officials said today that they were removing the monitoring equipment “because the U.S. unilaterally abandoned its commitment to supply heavy oil in compensation for the loss of electricity,” the nation’s official Korean Central News Agency reported.

“This situation compelled [us] to immediately start the work of removing the seals and monitoring cameras from the frozen nuclear facilities for their normal operation to produce electricity,” the agency said.