North Korea, in a setback to the Bush administration's counter-proliferation campaign, appears to be reassembling its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, citing the U.S.'s failure to remove Pyongyang from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
In recent days, North Korea stopped discharging spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon facility, said U.S. officials involved in verifying Pyongyang's denuclearization activities.
And North Korean workers also have begun returning equipment to the reactor site that was decommissioned as part of the broader disarmament pact Pyongyang reached with the Bush administration last year.
One U.S. official working on verification said North Korean leader Kim Jong Il could restore the Yongybon facility to full operating capacity in three to six months if restoration work were to continue.
The U.S. official said Americans stationed at the Yongbyon site to oversee the reactor's dismantlement have seen North Korean workers returning equipment to the reactor from storage facilities.
'Our people are on the ground,' said the U.S. official. 'The North Koreans are letting them watch their activities.'
South Korea's foreign ministry said in a statement that North Korea has started work to restore its nuclear facilities and that Seoul is monitoring the rehabilitation work at Yongbyon. The ministry said Seoul is 'seriously concerned' about the implications for the six-party diplomatic process aimed at disarming Pyongyang. The statement added that Seoul, Washington and other members of the negotiating forum were in consultations to decide how to respond to the North's movements at the site.
The U.S. State Department said Wednesday that North Korea has begun moving around some previously stored equipment at Yongbyon, but it doesn't appear to be trying to rebuild the facility. Spokesman Sean McCormack said, 'To my knowledge, based on what we know from the folks on the ground, you don't have an effort to reconstruct, reintegrate this equipment back into the Yongbyon facility.' He said Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the lead U.S. negotiator with North Korea, would leave for Beijing Thursday to consult with officials in China, which is hosting the six-party negotiations.
In June, Pyongyang handed over to the U.S. 18,000 pages of documents detailing the operating history of the Yongbyon facility as part of North Korea's agreement to allow the U.S. to verify the destruction of all the communist state's nuclear assets. North Korea that month also blew up the Yongbyon reactor's cooling tower as a symbol of Pyongyang's commitment to ending its nuclear-weapons program.
The U.S., in return, lifted some economic sanctions against North Korea and pledged to remove Pyongyang from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.
In recent weeks Pyongyang and Washington have traded public charges that the other side was responsible for the stalling of the completion of the disarmament process.
North Korea last week said it was going to reactivate Yongbyon because the Bush administration 'failed to keep its own side in the agreement' by not removing Pyongyang from the U.S. terrorism list.
U.S. officials have said in recent days that Washington hasn't taken the step because Kim Jong Il's government has refused to agree to the verification regime needed to ensure that it is making good on its pledge to destroy all of North Korea's nuclear weapons and facilities. These American officials say Pyongyang has balked at allowing snap inspections of its suspected nuclear sites or the sampling of the infrastructure and reactor core that makes up North Korea's nuclear program.
Senior U.S. officials also questioned whether Mr. Kim really has made the strategic decision to give up North Korea's nuclear assets. They also held out the possibility that Pyongyang's recent actions at Yongbyon are a negotiating ploy.
Jay Solomon |
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