North Korea throws down nuclear gauntlet to US

North Korea has announced plans to restart a Soviet-era atomic reactor, which the CIA believes can make plutonium for nuclear bombs.

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, described the decision as regrettable and said the United States would seek a peaceful resolution to the challenge presented by Pyongyang.

The announcement follows a dispute earlier this week over America's interception of a ship carrying 15 North Korean Scud missiles to Yemen. America wants to stop the rogue nation from supplying weapons of mass destruction to its enemies, such as al- Qa'ida or Iraq. The White House has vowed not to be blackmailed in its stand-off with the isolated, half- collapsed Stalinist state.

America's allies in the region expressed dismay at the announcement. South Korea's President, Kim Dae Jung, convened his national security cabinet, and his government expressed "deep regret and concern".

Japan called for a calm response, saying that it believed North Korea wanted a peaceful outcome, but urged Pyongyang to maintain its freeze on its nuclear power plants.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry presented the move as its retort to a US-led cut in fuel oil supplies, but analysts said it was an attempt by North Korea to force Washington to negotiate a new nuclear pact, partly driven by its resentment of being part of President Bush's "axis of evil".

An unnamed official from North Korea, which has been hit by famine and is facing a freezing winter, said it was resuming the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity. "Our principled stand is that the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula should be resolved peacefully," the spokesman said. "It's totally up to the United States whether we will freeze our nuclear facilities again."

But the remarks, picked up and relayed by South Korea, were universally seen as a threat to use the plants to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium, playing on some of America's worst fears.

If the North Koreans act on their word, it will mean reactivating a Soviet-designed 5MW (megawatt) atomic reactor at Yongbyon, 60 miles from the capital of Pyongyang. This was mothballed after the 1994 agreement, which ended a year-long crisis on the Korean peninsula and averted possible war.

A report on North Korea's nuclear weapons programme recently submitted to the US Congress said that this plant is thought capable of producing 7kg of plutonium annually, enough to make one nuclear bomb. American intelligence has concluded it has been used for making nuclear bombs. North Korea is believed to have shut down the reactor for 70 days in 1989 to remove fuel rods for reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium. There was another shutdown in 1994, when an estimated 8,000 rods were taken out.

Western experts say the supply, now being monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, could swiftly be turned into weapons-grade plutonium.

Construction would also be resumed on two larger graphite-moderated reactors – 50MW and 200MW – which the Americans believe could eventually provide enough plutonium to manufacture 30 nuclear warheads a year.

Pyongyang's move follows the suspension of deliveries of heavy fuel oil, which Washington, Japan, South Korea and the EU had been making under a 1994 accord in return for a North Korean pledge to stop its suspected nuclear weapons programme. The free deliveries, at 500,000 tonnes a year, were put on hold after the Americans discovered that North Korea was operating a secret programme to enrich uranium. The 1994 Framework Agreement also provided for the supply of two "proliferation-resistant" light water reactors to North Korea.

To Pyongyang's frustration, these have been delayed, not least by arguments among the US-led consortium over funding, and are years behind schedule. In October, James Kelly, a US asssistant secretary of state, confronted the North Koreans with the evidence. They initially denied it, but later confirmed it, adding they had "more powerful weapons".

The US National Defence Intelligence Council said last year that the North Koreans had one, and probably two, nuclear weapons; other estimates are as high as six.

THE ROGUE NATION

Stone broke and brutally repressive, the Stalinist nation led by Kim Jong Il has been steadily working on acquiring nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them as far away as the west coast of the United States.

North Korea not only has the capacity to make weapons-grade plutonium in its nuclear plants, which it now says it will reactivate so that it can produce electricity, it has also long been developing the missiles to deliver the resulting warheads.

Four years ago, say the Americans, North Korea deployed the Nodung missile, whose 600-mile range places all of South Korea and part of Japan in its compass. It has hundreds of Scuds, and rocket launchers capable of reaching South Korea and the 37,000 American soldiers in the demilitarised zone.

For eight years it has been working on long-range Teapo Dong ballistic missiles, which the CIA says would be capable of striking all of Japan, and could eventually reach as far as Alaska and Hawaii and the American west coast.

The US says North Korea has enough plutonium to produce two or three nuclear weapons and that it is two or three years away from producing weapons grade uranium.

Some 3,000 scientists and researchers reportedly work at a nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Many of them have studied nuclear technology in Russia, China and Pakistan. The US says Pakistan has been trading nuclear know-how in return for missiles.