North Korea Rebuffs U.N., Insists Nuclear Inspectors Must Go

North Korea held fast Saturday to its demand that international nuclear inspectors leave the country, rebuffing pleas from the U.N. to keep the monitors in place. They will leave the country by Tuesday, officials said. A North Korean official told the three inspectors, who work for the U.N.’s Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, that they can no longer monitor activities at the Yongbyon nuclear facility, 55 miles north of the capital, Pyongyang.

Activity at the site, which includes several facilities related to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, had been frozen under a 1994 agreement with the United States. However, North Korea declared this month that it intends to restart its nuclear program and has begun taking steps to do so.

“This is a country in defiance of its international obligations,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA’s director general, who has tried to use the tools available to the U.N. nuclear watchdog to get North Korea to slow down the revival of its nuclear program. On Friday, he urged North Korea to reconsider its expulsion order, to no avail.

The inspectors will depart the site today for Pyongyang and leave the country Tuesday -- the first day there is a flight out, said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the agency. They are expected to arrive in Vienna later in the week.

The Yongbyon site includes a nuclear research reactor, a storage pond that holds about 8,000 spent fuel rods, and a laboratory that can extract plutonium from spent fuel rods and reprocess it for use in weapons.

North Korea has said it is restarting the nuclear facilities to generate electricity, which it desperately needs to get through the winter. Its supply of fuel oil was cut off in October when the United States refused to continue to deliver it after North Korea admitted to having a secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. However, experts say the North’s reactor cannot generate a significant amount of electricity.

Countries in the region quickly expressed their distress at North Korea’s decision to expel the inspectors and geared up for regional talks aimed at trying to find a way to defuse the situation. But it is the United States that must engage with North Korea if there is to be a peaceful solution, diplomats in China and Russia said Saturday.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov strongly urged the United States to seek dialogue rather than confrontation with North Korea.

“You cannot achieve anything through accusations, pressure or tight demands, not to mention threats,” Losyukov told the Interfax news agency. “That will only make it worse.”

South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung Hong called his Chinese counterpart, Tang Jiaxuan, on Saturday to reconfirm their shared belief that the Korean peninsula should be nuclear-free, officials said.

“Minister Tang said the Chinese government hopes the United States and North Korea will resolve the issue through dialogue,” said South Korean Assistant Foreign Minister Lee Tae Shik.

Japan announced it would use diplomatic channels to register its distress over North Korea’s action and was ready to work with the United States and South Korea to defuse the situation.

But the United States continued its refusal to talk to the impoverished Communist regime, refusing to make any overtures, saying that to do so would be bowing to nuclear blackmail.

“The United States will not negotiate in response to threats or broken commitments,” White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.

As for the United Nations, the 35 countries that make up the IAEA’s board of governors will meet in Vienna on Jan. 6 to decide what steps to take. They are expected to refer the situation to the U.N. Security Council. However, it is unclear what action the council could take that would make a difference.

Unlike the situation in Iraq, where U.N. inspectors have been allowed to enter to examine suspect sites, North Korea is blocking any such examination of suspicious areas. That leaves the Security Council few options other than the unlikely one of authorizing the use of force. Sanctions, another option, might be tried, but the country is already so impoverished, some people question whether they could have much effect.

The order expelling the inspectors capped a tension-filled week in which North Korea took daily steps toward restarting its nuclear weapons program by cutting seals placed by the IAEA on the Yongbyon nuclear facilities and disabling surveillance cameras the agency had put in place.

Most worrisome to nuclear weapons experts is that in the last two days workers appeared to be beginning to repair the plutonium reprocessing lab. Plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons. Even if North Korea could not manufacture a bomb, weapons-grade material is highly marketable and the cash- and food-starved nation could sell it to other countries interested in building nuclear weapons.

The lab will take two to three months to be put in working order, experts said.

U.N. officials watching the situation unfold said that for the moment at least, there appears no easy way to defuse the confrontation.

“They are still pursuing their policy of defiance. They continue to escalate a crisis situation,” ElBaradei said. “This road they are embarking on is completely a dead end.”