A former U.S. negotiator just back from a tour of North Korea’s main nuclear site warned yesterday that the communist state plans to use any delays in nuclear negotiations with Washington to make additional atom bombs.
“Time is not on the U.S. side,” Jack Pritchard, the State Department’s former envoy for talks with the North quoted Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan as saying. “Lapses of time will result in quantitative and qualitative increases in our nuclear deterrent.”
Mr. Pritchard added: “Are they bluffing? I don’t think so.”
During a visit to the North’s facility at Yongbyon, American visitors saw proof that 8,000 spent fuel rods, which can be reprocessed to extract plutonium for atomic bombs, had been removed from their holding pond.
However, the delegation was shown no evidence that the fuel rods had been reprocessed, as the North Koreans claimed last year, said Mr. Pritchard. He resigned from his position in August over policy differences with the Bush administration and is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“The storage facility where the fuel rods had been canned was empty,” he said. “I can guarantee you they are not in that pond, but I don’t know where they went.”
Although the group did see a reprocessing facility, there was no way to tell whether the fuel rods had gone through it, Mr. Pritchard said.
He declined to share more details of what he and four other Americans had learned while touring Yongbyon, which includes a 5-megawatt nuclear reactor and a plutonium reprocessing facility.
Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos nuclear laboratories who was part of the group, will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.
Mr. Pritchard said he briefed State Department officials on the visit and Mr. Hecker did the same at the Department of Energy.
The other Americans who visited the site were: John Lewis, a Stanford University scholar, and Frank Jannuzi and Keith Luse from the staff of the Senate Foreign Relation’s Committee.
In nine hours of meetings with the Americans on Jan. 7, Mr. Kim flatly denied that North Korea has a separate program to enrich uranium, which, like plutonium, can be used to make nuclear bombs.
U.S. officials say the North, when confronted by U.S. officials with intelligence during a visit to Pyongyang in October 2002, admitted having a secret uranium enrichment program.
“Not only do we not have such a program, but we don’t even have scientists and facilities to develop it,” Mr. Pritchard quoted Mr. Kim as saying.
Mr. Pritchard, who was present when James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, first mentioned the uranium-enrichment effort 15 months ago, said U.S. intelligence had convinced him that the program exists.
“I do believe they have such a program,” he said.
But he noted that China and other participants in six-party talks aimed at resolving the standoff are skeptical because the United States has not shown them any evidence.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday that Washington has provided some of the information to other parties, but they have not been able to match it with their own intelligence.
China, which hosted the first six-party meeting in August, has been trying to convene another session. Japan, South Korea and Russia are also part of the group.
The administration has refused to negotiate directly with the communist state and devised the six-party format last year to avoid bilateral discussions.
It maintains that any commitment the North makes to all parties — especially its allies China and Russia — will be much harder to break.
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