January 11, 2004; Page A01
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer
Photo: Map of North Korea locating nuclear facilities. North Korea showed its 'nuclear deterrent force' to US scientists and congressional officials who visited its nuclear site this week, Pyongyang's official media said. (AFP/hk)
An unofficial delegation of U.S. experts visiting North Korea last week examined what the Pyongyang government said was its "nuclear deterrent," apparently providing the first confirmation that Pyongyang has produced the key ingredient for nuclear weapons.
U.S. officials said they have received only initial details of the visit, and they cautioned that they do not yet know the full extent of the facilities and materials examined by the delegation. But one official said the delegation had been shown what the North Koreans described as recently reprocessed plutonium.
According to this account, North Korean officials told the experts they were prepared to "freeze" the program to resolve the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
U.S. intelligence has long estimated that North Korea during the 1980s had obtained enough weapons-grade plutonium for one or two weapons, but that analysis was largely based on guesswork. Moreover, U.S. analysts have not been able to confirm North Korea had obtained additional plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods after ousting U.N. inspectors a year ago from its Yongbyon nuclear facility. No outsiders -- before this delegation -- have visited Yongbyon since the inspectors left.
Two key questions for U.S. officials have been whether North Korea has obtained a steady supply of fissile material for bombs and whether the administration's diplomatic efforts in the past year have restrained Pyongyang from pressing ahead with its nuclear program.
The experts -- a group that included former U.S. officials, congressional aides and a former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico -- told reporters they visited Yongbyon, which is 50 miles north of Pyongyang and contains nuclear reactors and a reprocessing facility. They refused to speak in detail about the five-day trip when they arrived in Beijing yesterday, saying they would disclose their findings to the U.S. government.
But, in a Foreign Ministry statement carried by the official North Korean news agency, Pyongyang said it had shown its "nuclear deterrent force" to the group, which was headed by Stanford University scholar John W. Lewis.
"If the visit of Lewis and the nuclear specialist and their party helped the U.S. even a bit to drop its ambiguous view on [North Korea's] nuclear activities, it would serve as a substantial foundation for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue between [North Korea] and the U.S. in the future," the statement said.
"The permission given by [North Korea] to visit the facility was aimed to give Americans an opportunity to confirm the reality by themselves," the statement added.
Siegfried Hecker, a metallurgist who headed Los Alamos from 1985 to 1997, plans to testify publicly about the trip Jan. 20 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a senior Senate staffer said yesterday. Lewis and another team member, Charles L. Pritchard, may also testify. Pritchard resigned from the State Department in August after failing to persuade the administration to negotiate directly with North Korea.
U.S. officials said the visit appears designed to pressure the Bush administration as the United States and its allies struggle to arrange a second round of six-nation talks to resolve the crisis. North Korea has repeatedly said it would freeze its program -- as it did during the Clinton administration -- but the Bush administration has insisted it agree to a verifiable and irreversible dismantling of its nuclear programs, including a clandestine effort to produce highly enriched uranium.
"We know exactly what the North Koreans are doing with these guys," said a senior administration official. "It's the same old game."
The Foreign Relations Committee is also pressing administration officials to testify on the status of the six-nation talks, the Senate aide said.
China, which is hosting the talks, has spent weeks trying to get the United States and North Korea to agree in advance on the text of a statement that would be issued after the talks are completed.
A delegation of Chinese officials is traveling to Washington this week carrying yet another draft that would attempt to merge the North Korean concept of a freeze and U.S. insistence that the programs be dismantled. But U.S. and Asian officials said the Chinese appear ready to abandon the effort to arrange a statement in advance, raising the possibility the talks will end in acrimony.
North Korea, for instance, appears to have barely budged from the offer it made last month to freeze its nuclear programs. The proposal included a suspension of its peaceful nuclear power programs, but diplomats noted that North Korea has no peaceful nuclear programs.
The divide between the United States and North Korea is illustrated by a statement provided by a senior North Korean diplomat recently to the Center for National Policy, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. The diplomat, Li Gun, outlined what he called "the order of simultaneous action."
First, the United States must resume shipments of heavy oil and greatly expand food aid, and in exchange North Korea would renounce nuclear intentions. Once the United States provided security assurances in writing and provides energy compensation, North Korea would freeze its facilities and allow inspections of its nuclear material. North Korean missiles would be restrained after the United States and Japan establish diplomatic relations with North Korea. Finally, North Korea's programs would be dismantled only after the United States and its allies finished building light-water reactors in North Korea -- a program suspended by the Bush administration.
By contrast, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week that North Korea must issue a statement declaring it will verifiably and permanently end its nuclear programs before the United States would offer its ideas for security assurances, let alone begin discussing energy or economic aid.
Correspondent Philip P. Pan in Beijing contributed to this report.
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