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North Korea | Germany | South Africa North Korea: Continuing Questions On Nuclear Compliance The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) will not give the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) any data on its past nuclear operations, according to Kim Yong Gil, a diplomat at the DPRK's UN Mission in New York. Kim's statement, made in a March 10 interview with Nucleonics Week, raises additional questions about whether the IAEA has the means to verify DPRK compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). (See Nuclear Watch March 2 and February 23.) Late last month, Mohamad Elbaradei, Director General of the IAEA, said he was confident that the DPRK nuclear program was frozen, according to the terms of the 1994 Agreed Framework. But he added that that the presence of three IAEA safeguards inspectors at the DPRK's Yongbyon nuclear reactor would not suffice to fully verify the DPRK's nuclear materials inventory declaration, submitted to the Vienna agency in 1992. U.S. intelligence sources have stated that the DPRK may have separated a significant quantity of plutonium during previous operation of the Yongbyon reactor. Without additional assistance from the DPRK, including data on past operations, the IAEA cannot examine the inventory declaration in detail. Since 1994, the DPRK has been out of compliance with the NPT, a treaty it signed in 1985, because it won't allow the IAEA to verify. But IAEA certification of compliance is needed before the U.S. go through with a deal it brokered in 1994 and transfer to the DPRK two power reactors from the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) in exchange for nonproliferation pledges from Pyongyang. Kim said that Pyongyang's sole responsibility to the IAEA is to "make sure we have frozen our activities" at the Yongbyon nuclear research center. "We are under no obligation to give them any operating records for any facility." Kim also said that the U.S. must now step in and assure that the reactor transfer to the north will come off as planned. He charged that, over the last six months, abetted by the economic crisis in the Republic of Korea (ROK), there have been "serious delays" in the project which have drawn ire in Pyongyang. Kim added that, in the light of the State Department in January having nixed a request by reactor vendor ABB-CE for an export license for the reactors, the DPRK would not accept a gambit to re-flag the U.S. technology as South Korean, to avoid the necessity of an outstanding nuclear cooperation agreement between the U.S. and the DPRK. "When the deal was made, both sides agreed that the export licenses would have to be issued by the U.S., not South Korea," he said. Some intelligence information indicates that the DPRK was developing a nuclear bomb before 1994, when it pledged to freeze its nuclear program. The CIA discovered that the DPRK carried out many experiments on so-called shaped charges, packages of conventional explosives used to compress a nuclear bomb core and make it critical and explode. Were the DPRK to have continued this work after 1994 there would be virtually no way of detecting it.
Germany: German-Russian Deal On Bomb-Grade Uranium Germany will import about 1,200 kilograms of Russian weapons-grade uranium under the terms of a deal signed last week. The uranium will supply a research reactor now under construction near Munich, but the deal still challenges U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, opposes the use of weapons-grade uranium in civilian reactors. One bomb's worth of weapons-grade uranium is about 15 to 25 kilograms. The U.S. has opposed Russian plans to sell the uranium, enriched to 93% U-235, since the mid-1990s. The Department of Energy has also told Germany it would prefer to have the German reactor redesigned to operate on low-enriched uranium which cannot be used for bombs. Last week, however, Russian premier Viktor Chernomyrdin signed the deal, which calls on the Russian uranium firm Techsnabexport to conclude a commercial contract with the Technical University of Munich, future operator of the reactor. German officials stated that strict Russian terms of sale would prevent Germany from using the uranium for any other purpose than as fuel in the FRM-2 reactor, and that Germany would not be allowed to retransfer the uranium to any third party. The reactor is expected to be finished by 2003. Normally, the European Union (EU) claims the right for any member state to export nuclear material to any other member state. But the EU is now willing to make an exception in the case of bomb-grade uranium, officials in Brussels said.
South Africa: South Africa to Review Sensitive Export to China The government of South Africa will decide by the end of March whether to allow the Atomic Energy Corp. of South Africa (AEC) to export a zirconium tube factory to China, according to Abdul Minty, South Africa's top nuclear proliferation official. Experts worry that such a factory could enhance Chinese nuclear weapons production capabilities, and, potentially, Chinese nuclear support for other countries, such as Iran. The planned transaction came to light in late 1997, when police raided an AEC complex at Pelindaba; South African police had been tipped off that Chinese workers were already packing up the equipment to ship it to China. After that, both the AEC as well as a cut-out company in the Channel Islands, have formally applied for an export license for the plant, but that application has not yet been processed. U.S. concerns about the deal include questions about the ultimate end-user of the facility, since China has made a separate contract to supply a similar facility to Iran, a country which the U.S. claims has a nuclear weapons program.
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