North Korea Restarts Reactor

North Korea restarted its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon within the last 24 hours, raising the stakes in its diplomatic showdown with the United States, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

But there were no signs that North Korea had reactivated its nuclear fuel reprocessing facility, which would be of even greater concern, officials said.

“I think this is another example of the regime of North Korea taking escalatory actions in order to gain concessions,” said Sean McCormack, a National Security Council spokesman.

The Korean crisis was sparked in October when the United States said Pyongyang had admitted to developing a highly enriched uranium program in violation of a 1994 accord, under which the North froze its nuclear efforts in exchange for energy and economic assistance. But now North Korea has restarted the reactor, U.S. officials said.

“This is certainly less provocative than starting up the reprocessing facility, but it is significant,” a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.

A sign that the reprocessing facility was being started would be movement of 8,000 spent fuel rods from a holding pond to the facility, where plutonium for weapons could be extracted.

The United States is working with members of the U.N. Security Council and others on finding a solution, McCormack said. “We have proposed multilateral talks to include North Korea, and remain prepared to engage in those talks,” he said.

In Beijing, the foreign ministers of China and Russia issued a joint communique promising to push for dialogue between the United States and North Korea, the official New China News Agency reported.