NYTimes.com Article: North Korea Hides New Nuclear Site, Evidence Sugges

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by tganesh@stlawu.edu.


Sanger on the North Korean enigma: what is really intriguing is the unabashed 
brazenness with which North Korea is presenting its' 'nuclear' self.  What 
accounts for this peculiar exhibition of self to world gaze? Why all this 
deliberate baiting of the US?  For aid?  For dialogue?  Is China perhaps behind 
all these developments? Ganesh. 

tganesh@stlawu.edu

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North Korea Hides New Nuclear Site, Evidence Suggests

July 20, 2003
 By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER 




 

WASHINGTON, July 19 - American and Asian officials with
access to the latest intelligence on North Korea say strong
evidence has emerged in recent weeks that the country has
built a second, secret plant for producing weapons-grade
plutonium, complicating both the diplomatic strategy for
ending the program and the military options if that
diplomacy fails. 

The discovery of the new evidence, which one senior
administration official cautioned was "very worrisome, but
still not conclusive," came just as North Korea declared to
the United States 11 days ago that it had completed
reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, enough to make
a half dozen or so nuclear weapons. 

American officials have said they cannot verify that claim,
though they confirm that sensors set up on North Korea's
borders have begun to detect elevated levels of krypton 85,
a gas emitted as spent fuel is converted into plutonium. 

What concerns American, South Korean and Japanese analysts,
however, is not simply the presence of the hard-to-detect
gas but its source. While American satellites have been
focused for years on North Korea's main nuclear plant, at
Yongbyon, the computer analyses that track the gases as
they are blown across the Korean Peninsula appeared to rule
out the Yongbyon reprocessing plant as their origin.
Instead, the analysis strongly suggests that the gas
originated from a second, secret plant, perhaps buried in
the mountains. 

American officials have long suspected that North Korea
would try to build a second plant to protect itself against
a pre-emptive strike by the United States. The United
States even demanded an inspection of one underground site
five years ago, only to find it empty, but this is the
first time evidence has emerged that a second plant may be
in operation. 

"This takes a very hard problem and makes it infinitely
more complicated," said one Asian official who has been
briefed on the American intelligence. "How can you verify
that they have stopped a program like this if you don't
know where everything is?" 

Indeed, there may now be at least two hidden facilities
with the capacity to produce material for nuclear weapons.
In October, confronted with American evidence, North Korean
officials admitted that they had clandestinely built a
plant intended to produce uranium, another fuel for a bomb.
(It is the same approach Saddam Hussein tried in the early
1990's, and that Iran is pursuing today.) American
officials say they have never found that plant, though they
believe it is still a few years away from full-scale
production. 

If it turns out that the current evidence is being properly
interpreted, and a second plutonium plant also exists,
President Bush may not even have the option that President
Bill Clinton briefly considered in 1994: using a military
strike or sabotage to prevent North Korea from producing
significant amounts of weapons-grade material. Still, Mr.
Bush has vowed that he "will not tolerate" a nuclear North
Korea. 

American intelligence officials say they are wary about
making any final judgments about the new evidence. They are
keenly aware that C.I.A. assessments of Iraq's nuclear
program have touched off a national debate over whether
intelligence was exaggerated, and have made all the
agency's findings suspect. 

That issue has also put the White House at odds with George
J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who knows
that the White House is going to extraordinary lengths to
avoid calling the nuclear confrontation with North Korea a
crisis. So far, White House officials have been told only
informally of the new evidence and have not been fully
briefed about its potential implications, administration
officials say. 

But each week the White House's effort to sound low-key is
being undercut by both North Korea's aggressive statements
and new evidence that the country is now driving toward
production. On Friday, the director of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who angered the
White House by questioning its evidence about Iraq,
expressed grave concerns about North Korea. 

The situation in North Korea "is currently the most
immediate and most serious threat to the nuclear
nonproliferation regime," he said from his headquarters in
Vienna. It is not clear if he was aware of the newest
evidence when he spoke. 

North Korea's stance regarding its nuclear program is
strikingly different than Iraq's was. After the North
Korean government threw out I.A.E.A. inspectors on New
Year's Eve, its government acknowledged - even boasted of -
its nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration has
suspected that some of the claims amount to bluffing, an
effort by North Korea to force the world to give it aid on
its terms in return for re-freezing, or perhaps
dismantling, its program. Mr. Bush has called the country's
efforts "blackmail," and he said he would not give in. 

But behind the scenes, the North Korean declarations have
hardly been dismissed. American intelligence officials have
been pouring tremendous resources into solving a mystery:
how could North Korea claim that it has reprocessed all of
its 8,000 rods if the one known reprocessing plant, at
Yongbyon, has been operating only sporadically? 

At the C.I.A. and the National Security Council, senior
officials have long expressed concern that they could be
missing something, that a second plant could be buried
somewhere, though that would pose a number of technical
challenges. Those fears have been heightened by reports
from South Korean intelligence that one of its agents -
whose reliability is unknown - reported the existence of a
second plant, northeast of Yongbyon. 

North Korea has an estimated 11,000 to 15,000 deep
underground military-industrial sites, according to one
American intelligence estimate, and the nation's leadership
has a history of constructing duplicate facilities for such
important capabilities as tank production or
command-and-communications systems. 

"If you follow their logic, if we find a second
reprocessing location, maybe there are more," said one
American official. "It is a reasonable assessment, given
North Korea's proclivity to have multiple facilities for
every critical aspect of its national security
infrastructure." 

Similar logic, of course, led the American intelligence
agencies to some of their conclusions about Iraq. But North
Korea has a far more sophisticated nuclear program, built
over the years with the help first of China and Russia, and
in the case of uranium production, Pakistan. 

China has now become fully engaged in trying to come up
with a diplomatic solution that would not cause chaos on
its border with North Korea, or an influx of refugees. A
senior Chinese official, Deputy Foreign Minister Dai
Bingguo, who has long experience with North Korea, spent an
unusually long time - two and half hours - meeting with
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other American
officials on Friday. He also saw Condoleezza Rice, the
national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney. 

The issue is the administration's demand that South Korea
and Japan be part of any negotiations with North Korea,
which wants to deal only with the United States. 

But some administration officials, especially at the
Pentagon, believe that negotiations, while necessary, will
ultimately prove fruitless. They do not believe that North
Korea will ever trade away all of its nuclear program, the
only card the starving country has to play to compel the
world's attention. 

Mr. Bush has said he would not settle for another nuclear
freeze, like the one Mr. Clinton approved in 1994, and he
has insisted that all North Korean nuclear facilities must
be dismantled. Mr. Bush has also come under increasing
criticism for letting the problem fester too long as he
dealt with Iraq, a view voiced by former Secretary of
Defense William J. Perry this week. 

Yet it is unclear what Mr. Bush may consider if diplomacy
fails. He is already organizing more intrusive inspections
of ships and planes, hoping to step up economic pressure on
North Korea. 

But for military planners, should Mr. Bush decide that
American security requires a pre-emptive attack, any
confirmation of additional weapons facilities vastly
complicates the work of singling out those facilities,
since there may be no certainty that all of the important
locations have been found. 

If any secret facilities have been operating, their
production of fissile material may have already spread in
small quantities to any number of other locations. The
C.I.A. concluded in the early 1990's that North Korea might
possess two crude weapons already, but it has never
confirmed that. 

Such uncertainties remain. The worst case is that the spent
fuel rods have been moved to a previously undiscovered
reprocessing plant, where the plutonium has been extracted
and already shipped around the nation in five- to
eight-kilogram packages for weapons production. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/asia/20KORE.html?ex=1059744402&ei=1&en=d42fcb24adb0f631


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