U.S. expert dismisses N. Korea's uranium bomb threat as exaggeration

By Hwang Doo-hyong
WASHINGTON, June 15 (Yonhap) -- A U.S. expert on nuclear technology Monday
dismissed as exaggeration the threat by North Korea to begin enriching uranium to
make further nuclear bombs.

"I tend to think that is an exaggeration in terms of how quickly they can do with
the centrifuge plant," David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and
International Security, said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency. "There is
some kind of research and experimental program, some kind of development
project."
Albright, a physicist and founder of the Washington-based independent research
institute specializing in nuclear technology, was discussing the first
acknowledgment by the reclusive communist state that it has a uranium program
aside from its plutonium-based nuclear reactor, which had been in the process of
being disabled under a six-party deal for the North's denuclearization.
The source of North Korea's nuclear technology was thought to be Pakistani
scientist A.Q. Khan, who confessed to secret dealings with North Korea and
several other countries. But he recently disavowed his remarks and was released
from house arrest earlier this year.
North Korea had vehemently denied the existence of the uranium-based nuclear
program since late 2002, when the Bush administration scrapped a 1994 nuclear
deal with Pyongyang, citing a secret uranium program.
"They are saying they expect some kind of enrichment efforts," Albright said.
"The statement says they didn't work on enrichment. They are pretty careful. So
they may deny something just like they did in the past."
Citing the clandestine uranium program, the Bush administration terminated the
Agreed Framework signed with North Korea in Geneva in 1994 to freeze North
Korea's plutonium-producing reactor in return for light-water reactors, energy
and other economic and political benefits.
"Just at a small scale, it was a problem, but was enough to stop the Agreed
Framework," the scholar said.
Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, knew about "some kind of enrichment efforts" in
North Korea, Albright said. "The Japanese also detected them. There was a big
plant under construction. The debate was on this: how big this plant was."
Clinton, however, did not raise it as his administration focused on North Korea's
plutonium-producing reactor and a ballistic missile launched in 1998.
Bush followed suit by ignoring the suspected uranium program to facilitate
progress in the six-party talks on the North's denuclearization.
Bush, who designated North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and
Iraq, was not active in dealing with North Korea until after North Korea's first
nuclear test in 2006.
Alarmed by the North's nuclear test, Bush actively engaged the North, and agreed
on a six-party deal in 2007 for provision of energy and economic aid and
normalization of ties with Washington and Tokyo in exchange for nuclear
disarmament. The deal failed to deal with the uranium program.
In his waning days in office in January, Bush talked about the uranium program
apparently to address the criticism that he ignored it for the sake of the talks.
"There might be a highly enriched uranium program," he said in the final news
conference as the president.
Bush's remarks were followed by a statement from then-Vice President Dick Cheney,
who said, "It looks like they have a continuing, ongoing program to produce
highly enriched uranium, in addition to what they were doing in Yongbyon at their
plutonium reactor."
The uranium program was considered a loophole in the six-party talks, which Bush
defended as having stopped the North from producing more plutonium for nuclear
warheads.
The Obama administration has taken a show-me approach.
"In March 2009, a State Department official said that it doesn't look like the
uranium enrichment program is continuing now," Albright said.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in February that she did not have
concrete evidence to prove there is a clandestine uranium-based nuclear program
in North Korea.
"Clearly, there was some reason to believe that something having to do with
highly enriched uranium -- whether it was happening in North Korea, whether it
had been imported into North Korea -- was part of the information derived once we
got inspectors into North Korea," she said, adding nobody can point to "any
specific location" or "any specific outcome of whatever might have gone on, if
anything did."
Albright urged the Obama administration to bring up the uranium program in future
negotiations with North Korea, fearing possible proliferation.
"It is very important to reestablish negotiations, and now the enrichment program
has to be on the agenda," he said.
"Our concerns with North Korea for several years have been not so much North
Korea will build the centrifuge plant, but sell centrifuges to others," he said.
"The proliferation side is much more dangerous than the building of centrifuge
plants inside North Korea. You know they have plutonium-based nuclear weapons.
The centrifuge program will just make it a little bit worse."
Uranium is more conducive to proliferation, Albright said. "There's a lot of
interested countries because they are much smaller. You can buy fewer.You can buy
a lot. So it's much more proliferation prone. It is much harder to track."
Albright said he believes North Korea has developed nuclear weapons to be mounted
on missiles and predicted Pyongyang will conduct more nuclear tests to improve
and miniaturize its nuclear arsenal.
"Their goal is to miniaturize nuclear weapons for missiles," he said. "That's
always part of the whole process. As soon as we started miniaturizing, we had
lots of delivery systems."
hdh@yna.co.kr
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