E. Asian Strategic Balance Remains

SEOUL -- The military and strategic balance in East Asia hasn’t changed much despite reports this week that North Korea admitted having an ongoing nuclear weapons program “and more.”

Military planners in East Asia have long assumed that the Communist regime’s program was well advanced. North Korea was found nearly a decade ago to have enough plutonium for two bombs, and several defectors have detailed their experiences working at fuel enrichment plants.

“While there may be some temporary impact on the North Asian neighborhood, in the long run we don’t see much change and believe a solution will be found,” said Lee Jong Seok, an analyst with South Korea’s Sejong Institute.

U.S. and Japanese intelligence estimates of one or more North Korean nuclear weapons have been around for some time, as have reports of nuclear cooperation among North Korea, Pakistan and former Soviet states.

Despite all its saber-rattling, the regime in Pyongyang has been contained successfully for decades, making it appear at times more of a threat from distant Washington than from nearby Tokyo or Seoul, analysts said. Pyongyang may even be hoping with its bombshell disclosure to bargain away a project it can no longer afford, some said.

Assessing how far along North Korea is in building a nuclear bomb is difficult, in part because of how little information the Bush administration has shared, said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“How far the program has gotten is the critical military part of the equation,” he said. “The administration knows,” but isn’t telling.

But experts say, in a violation of the spirit if not the letter of a 1994 Agreed Framework signed in Geneva, the North Koreans apparently switched gears in the mid-1990s from plutonium to a uranium-based development project.

Under the pact, Pyongyang had pledged to give up its plutonium research and other nuclear plans in return for 500,000 tons of fuel oil annually and two light-water reactors for civilian use.

Uranium is mined in North Korea, making it less subject to oversight, cross-border safeguards and probing questions by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency that characterize international shipments of nuclear material.

And while plutonium processing requires expensive and cumbersome equipment that is difficult to hide, uranium operations can be far more modest, said Shin Sung Taek, research director at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul.

“It’s a totally different issue with uranium,” he said. “All you need is an enrichment facility, which can be underground and small in size.”

Kim Dae Ho, who worked in North Korea’s nuclear processing industry before defecting in 1994, said the program was an obvious priority for the regime.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many facilities weren’t heavily disguised, although they were well protected. “It wasn’t really hidden, but ordinary people simply couldn’t go there,” Kim said. “The Namchon Chemical Factory where I worked had 10-foot-high concrete fences, electrified barbed-wire fencing and full military security.”

North Korea has about 26 million tons of uranium deposits at locations including Sunchon in South Pyongan province and in Kumchon and Pyongsan in North Hwanghae province, South Korean analysts say. Of that amount, about 4 million tons are easily accessible.

It takes enormous quantities of uranium to produce a small amount of the enriched material needed for a weapon, however.

Gas diffusion and the use of centrifuges are usual methods for enriching uranium, but Shin said his institute believes North Korea has probably used lasers to extract the required uranium-235. The other two methods require a huge amount of electricity, of which North Korea is notably short.

While the laser separation method takes less electricity, it’s a tedious, inefficient and labor-intensive process.

Military analysts say Pakistan has also been a source of enriched uranium for North Korea, perhaps in return for ballistic missiles. But Shin said he hasn’t seen any conclusive evidence.

Pakistan produced a uranium-enriched bomb -- as opposed to India’s plutonium-based program -- and its missiles resemble North Korea’s, he added.

In addition, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the colorful and controversial “father of the Pakistani nuclear program,” made a dozen trips to North Korea in the late 1990s, said Cirincione. The first evidence of enrichment equipment in North Korea also paralleled the appearance of North Korean missiles in Pakistan, Cirincione added.

North Korea has not tested a nuclear device, experts say, a relatively easy event to monitor. But Pakistan may have agreed to test devices and share the results with North Korea, said Hideshi Takesada, professor of the Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto twice visited Pyongyang, he said, amid speculation the two nations were cooperating militarily.

The methodology needed to build enriched-uranium bombs has been around a long time, said Shin. Many of its underlying techniques were pioneered in the 1940s during the days of the Manhattan Project, which eventually produced the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Technology and know-how flow like water,” he said. “A lot of it’s out there, even on the Internet.”

In following the global proliferation trail, one irony is that the most likely source for Pakistan’s technology is China, Cirincione said. In the early 1990s, China sold about 3,000 ring magnets, a critical element in building centrifuges to enrich uranium, to Pakistan, he said.

Lee Young Hwa, professor at Japan’s Kansai University and a representative of Rescue the North Korean People, a civic organization, cites the experience of a woman his group helped to escape through China in 2000.

The woman, a physicist whose name he wouldn’t disclose, worked until 1999 at a North Korean plant that was developing nuclear and chemical weapons, she told him.

About 150 people, including the physicist, worked at an elite institute attached to the complex built shortly after international pressure intensified for nuclear inspections in the early 1990s. It was reportedly hidden in the forest and served by a specially built railroad line.

Researchers enjoyed 20% to 30% higher salary than compatriots, the rescue group said in a report, but researchers weren’t allowed to contact outside researchers and their lives were otherwise severely restricted.

For Gary Milhollin, head of the Wisconsin Project for Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, a major concern is that Pyongyang might now sharply raise the ante.

If the North repudiates the 1994 agreed framework, Pyongyang could reprocess plutonium into bomb cores that had been shelved under international supervision in 1994. This could lead to an estimated half-dozen bombs within as little as six months.

“I don’t think either [Iraq or North Korea] would do anything, absent an attack from us,” Milhollin said. “But if they thought they were going to be attacked, they would have to consider what the best use of their nuclear capability would be.”

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Hisako Ueno in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.