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By Mark Hibbs
August 24, 1998
 
No One Will Confirm Times Report DPRK is Building a New Nuclear Site
 
In the aftermath of a New York Times story in which unnamed sources alleged that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is building a plutonium separation plant or underground reactor on a fresh site, U.S. officials who routinely handle intelligence on clandestine nuclear programs said they were unable to get the report confirmed.
 
The Times story ran on August 17. It led to other reports in the Washington Post and Washington Times which, likewise, suggested that North Korea was about to scuttle the 1994 Agreed Framework, reached between the DPRK and the U.S., to build two U.S. reactors in North Korea in exchange for eventual IAEA safeguards compliance by the DPRK.
 
But there were elements of the story, some of which were not reported out last week in the major media, which suggest that something else may be going on in the DPRK than a clandestine effort to mount a serious nuclear threat.
 
  • The original report of tunnel-building at a site about 25 miles from Yongbyon, which hosts the DPRK's official nuclear complex, was first passed from U.S. intelligence agency officers to officials in the Republic of Korea (ROK), even before it was distributed in the U.S. Executive Branch.
 
  • Immediately after the report was published in the New York Times, nonproliferation officials in several U.S. Executive Branch agencies requested clarification from U.S. intelligence since they had not been informed. Some officials who were in the dark were directly responsible for implementing the Agreed Framework. They didn't know that there was any intelligence which indicated that the DPRK was building more nuclear facilities until they read the story in the Times.
 
  • Officials said that, had the U.S. intelligence community reached a consensus that the DPRK was building a new nuclear facility, that information would have been immediately communicated as a matter of keen relevance to officials at the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy who monitor nuclear proliferation. That didn't happen.
 
  • The ROK government said on August 18, the day after the Times story ran, that it learned of the matter through official channels but that there was no solid link at that time pointing to construction of any specific nuclear facility at the site where the tunnels were being excavated.
 
  • Early accounts of the tunnel-building did not provide important qualifying information that North Korea has three unfinished plants--two reactors and a reprocessing plant--which are nearly completed. This was confirmed by open testimony of former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry in 1994. American officials told Nucleonics Week that if the DPRK was going to scuttle the Agreed Framework and unleash its nuclear program, frozen since 1994, it would likely try to finish these projects--not start from scratch to build a brand new facility.
 
  • In Europe, the day after the Times story broke, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is monitoring the freeze of the DPRK's nuclear activities under the Agreed Framework, said it might ask for a ''special inspection'' to look at the tunnel-building site. But both U.S. and European officials said that could not happen unless there was hard evidence that the site was intended to host a nuclear plant.
 
  • European officials also discounted the claim that the DPRK is building a nuclear plant, since the U.S, while seeking up to several hundred millions of dollars from Europe to pay for the Agreed Framework project, never disclosed to European governments that the DPRK is now building new nuclear facilities.
 
  • Finally, the DPRK must know that, if it were to try to covertly build nuclear facilities in violation of the Agreed Framework, it would have to keep visible activity to a minimum. The DPRK also knows that U.S. intelligence assets had been beefed up to monitor their country since the Clinton Administration wedded its political fortunes to the Agreed Framework of 1994. Even before that, U.S. intelligence took hundreds of pictures of a site which the U.S. believed was being used to store some nuclear waste, brought there by a handful of workers. The new data showing the tunnel-building near Yongbyon showed that as many as 40,000 workers were busy excavating at the site - hardly activity that would escape notice.
 
  • Some U.S. officials now openly conjecture that the DPRK's recently stepped-up digging is an effort to alert the U.S. that it wants action in getting the Agreed Framework implemented. A second possibility is that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is putting on a show of strength and defiance towards the rest of the world in order to alleviate domestic pressure coming from his military bureaucracy.
 

Nuclear Watch is written exclusively for Global Beat. Mark Hibbs is European Editor of Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, leading specialist newsletters on international nuclear affairs, published by McGraw-Hill, Inc. Hibbs, based in Bonn, Germany, covers nuclear energy and proliferation problems in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia.

Mark Hibbs' coordinates:
Tel: x49-228-215051
Fax: x49-228-218849
E-mail: mhibb@mh.com

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