N. Korea Warned Over Yongbyon Restoration
By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
Top diplomats of South Korea and the United States expressed serious concern Wednesday over North Korea's moves to rebuild the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, warning that such actions would only isolate the communist regime from the rest of the international community.
``We've been through ups and downs in this process before. The important thing is that this is a six-party process and that means there are other states that are carrying the same message,'' said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in New York, where the United Nations General Assembly is underway.
She said that discussions with the North on denuclearization were ``by no means'' dead.
South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Yu Myung-hwan told reporters in Washington, D.C., ``We are sending messages in various ways to North Korea to ask them not to aggravate the situation.''
Yu said he believed North Korea was taking a trademark brinkmanship tactic to gain the upper hand in ``last-minute'' talks with the Bush administration whose term is nearly ended.
In that context, he said, North Korea might continue to raise the threat level by taking more steps to restore the facility.
U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood urged the North Koreans to reverse their actions and to come into compliance with those obligations under the six-party framework.
Wood stressed their actions aimed at rebuilding the plutonium-producing plant would only deepen Pyongyang's isolation.
Since it announced an intent to restore the nuclear reactor late last month, North Korea has taken symbolic steps to reverse the Feb. 13 disarmament-for-aid deal reached last year under the six-party forum involving the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia. Pyongyang shifts the blame to Washington, which it argues has delayed its de-listing from a U.S. terrorism blacklist.
The United States urges North Korea to accept a comprehensive protocol to verify its declaration of its nuclear materials and programs made in June before the de-listing.
Earlier this week, North Korea broke International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seals and cameras at its main nuclear atomic complex and told monitors to leave, according to IAEA officials.
North Korea has vowed to reactivate the complex and notified the U.N. nuclear watchdog that it could reintroduce nuclear materials as early as next week.
Experts say the Yongbyon reactor could take up to a year to get back into commission, so there will be no new plutonium production for a while.
But there is plenty already available in the form of spent fuel rods taken from the reactor core and stored in a water-cooled tank on the site, they say. Some estimates suggest the fuel rods could produce about 6kg of plutonium within two to three months, enough for one nuclear bomb.
North Korea is believed to have already extracted up to 50kg of plutonium from the plant.