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.

The start of the visit last Tuesday coincided with the North’s announcement that it would not test or produce nuclear weapons and would even stop operating its nuclear-power industry, in exchange for concessions from Washington. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called the offer positive.

However, on Friday, Pyongyang suggested that such negotiations might be tough, warning against expecting the North to follow “some Middle East countries” — an apparent reference to Libya’s decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction. Libya announced such a decision last month after talks with the United States and Britain.

Washington said it hoped other countries would do the same.

“To expect any ’change’ from the DPRK stand is as foolish as expecting a shower from clear sky,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. “It is the historical truth that peace is won and defended only with strength.”

Meanwhile, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper said yesterday that China had offered North Korea $50 million in aid to take part in a new round of six-party talks.

China’s No. 2 leader, Wu Bangguo, presented the offer to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il during a visit to the capital, Pyongyang, in October, the newspaper said, citing unidentified sources. It said North Korea would get the money only after the conclusion of the talks.

The nuclear standoff flared in October 2002, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to running a secret nuclear-weapons program in violation of international agreements.

American monitoring ships in the Sea of Japan first detected heightened levels of krypton gas in the atmosphere last March — an indication that reprocessing had started again after an agreement the North Koreans made in 1994 to cease activities at Yongbyon broke down. In late 2002, North Korea claimed that it had finished reprocessing 8,000 spent plutonium rods that were being stored at Yongbyon, enough to build up to six more nuclear weapons.

“The current estimate is that North Korea has reprocessed enough plutonium for up to four bombs,” a Western diplomat who specializes in the region told the Telegraph.