North Korea bares nukes

SEOUL — North Korea said yesterday that it showed its “nuclear deterrent” to an unofficial U.S. delegation that visited the disputed Yongbyon nuclear complex, which had been closed to outsiders since the North expelled U.N. inspectors more than a year ago.

A member of the delegation, which included nuclear experts and former government officials, said the five Americans were allowed to see everything they requested, but it was not clear if the “nuclear deterrent” was a bomb. Delegates said they could give no further details until they reported to Washington.

The delegation visited Yongbyon during negotiations to arrange a new round of six-nation talks on ending the standoff over the North’s suspected nuclear-weapons program, which Pyongyang says is necessary to defend the country against a U.S. invasion. The first round of talks in August ended without much progress.

“As everybody knows, the United States compelled [North Korea] to build a nuclear deterrent,” the official KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

“We showed this to Lewis and his party this time,” the spokesman said, referring to one of the delegates, John W. Lewis, a Stanford University professor emeritus of international relations.

The delegates, who returned to Beijing yesterday, would not say how much time they spent at Yongbyon. Mr. Lewis said they met North Korean military, foreign affairs, scientific and economic officials, but he would not identify them or talk about what they discussed.

“We are a private delegation,” Mr. Lewis said. “We were not there to negotiate. We were not there to be inspectors.”

U.S. officials believe the North already has one or two nuclear bombs and could make several more within months. North Korea never has confirmed or denied having atomic weapons.

[The London Daily Telegraph, citing Western diplomats, reported yesterday that North Korea is believed to have developed material for as many as four nuclear devices at the Yongbyon complex.]

The U.S. delegation was the first group from outside the reclusive communist country to visit the Yongbyon plant since the expulsion of U.N. inspectors at the end of 2002.

“The delegation’s visit to the facility was not an inspection, but a visit at the invitation” of North Korea, the spokesman said.

The visit was to “ensure transparency as speculative reports and ambiguous information about the DPRK’s nuclear activities are throwing hurdles in the way of settling the pending nuclear issue,” he said, referring to North Korea’s official name, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“Transparency serves as a basis of realistic thinking and, at the same time, a basis for solving the issue,” he said.

Besides Mr. Lewis, the delegation included Sig Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; Jack Pritchard, a former staff member of the National Security Council and a former State Department official; and two staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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