N.Korea Reprocessed All 8,000 Nuclear Fuel Rods

July 13, 2003

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has reprocessed all 8,000 spent fuel rods stored at its Yongbyong nuclear complex, giving the communist state the means to make more atomic weapons, a South Korean news agency said Sunday.  

According to the Yonhap agency, Chang Sung-min, a top intelligence aide to former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, said U.N.-based North Korean diplomats had told U.S. officials that the reprocessing had been completed.

"North Korean delegates told U.S. officials in an unofficial meeting in New York on July 8 that the reprocessing of spent fuel rods was completed on June 30," Chang was quoted as saying.

Seoul's Foreign Ministry later issued a statement saying that South Korea and the United States had exchanged information about the North's nuclear activities. It declined to elaborate.

Washington and Seoul are trying to draw North Korea into talks aimed at negotiating an end to its plans to acquire nuclear weapons. Intelligence reports have estimated that the isolated, impoverished state has already built one or two such weapons.

If confirmed, the latest Yonhap report would show the North Koreans had made more progress than previously suspected in amassing the raw material for making nuclear arms.

South Korea's intelligence agency told parliament last week it estimated that the North had recently reprocessed a small number of the 8,000 spent fuel rods stored at Yongbyon, a city 75 km (47 miles) north of Pyongyang.

The rods were part of a plutonium-based nuclear weapons program that was frozen under a 1994 nuclear agreement between North Korea and the United States.

The pact unravelled earlier this year after U.S. revelations of a covert North Korean scheme to enrich uranium for bombmaking.


AIR SAMPLES

The latest Yonhap report follows one by Japan's Kyodo news agency Saturday, citing U.S. sources as saying air samples taken close to Yongbyon had shown traces of krypton 85, a reprocessing by-product.

Quoting Chang, now a U.S.-based academic, Yonhap said that the North Koreans in New York had also repeated Pyongyang's insistence that the United States agree to direct one-to-one talks to resolve the nuclear standoff.

The two Koreas wound up three days of ministerial talks in Seoul Saturday agreeing to pursue "an appropriate way of dialogue" to end the nuclear dispute.

South Korea hailed the joint statement as a step toward a peaceful resolution, but the wording masked the two sides' failure to bridge the divide over how to open negotiations.

Washington and Seoul are insisting on multilateral talks involving the United States, the two Koreas and their immediate northeast Asian neighbors, Japan and China.

Saturday, North Korea said through its official Minju Chosun daily that it was not opposed to multilateral talks, but demanded to hold bilateral talks with the United States first.

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