North Korea bars inspectors from nuclear complex

PARIS: North Korea has barred international inspectors from its nuclear reprocessing facility and intends to begin introducing nuclear material in a week, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Wednesday.

The decision by North Korea comes as the Vienna-based nuclear agency also announced it had completed on Wednesday the removal of all seals and surveillance cameras from the reprocessing plant at the Yongbyon complex. The removal was carried out following a formal request to the agency by the North two days ago.

“There are no more seals and surveillance equipment in place at the reprocessing facility,” IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told reporters at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna.

She added that the North Koreans “also informed IAEA inspectors that they plan to introduce nuclear material to the reprocessing plant in one week’s time. They further stated that from here on, IAEA inspectors will have no further access to the reprocessing plant.”

The decision by the North is a serious setback both for the Bush administration and an international nuclear disarmament agreement that was aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

While the request to remove the seals and surveillance equipment had been anticipated, the nuclear agency and the United States and the other governments involved in delicate diplomacy with the North Koreans had hoped that they would not begin operations there again and that inspectors would still have access to the facility.

The move followed reports that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, was seriously ill, and was clear evidence that the North plans to restart the facility, which separates plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

More ominously, it suggests that the North may be preparing to restart its nuclear weapons program at a time when the United States is distracted by the financial crisis, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and unrest in Pakistan.

The move by North Korea is dangerous because the reprocessing of nuclear fuel from spent fuel rods can begin within months, according to arms control experts. It would take years, by contrast, for North Korean to produce fresh nuclear fuel if it decided to restart its nuclear reactor which is also on the complex at Yongbyon.

The announcement of the decision was first made by Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s deputy director general and head of the department of safeguards, to a closed meeting of the agency’s 35-country board of governors which is meeting in Vienna this week.

In prepared remarks at the meeting, Gregory Schulte, the chief American envoy to the IAEA, on Wednesday called North Korea’s move “unsettling.” He added, “We are working in close consultation with our six-party partners to determine the best way forward.”

North Korea has not told the nuclear agency whether its small permanent group of inspectors will be allowed to remain at the vast Yongbyon complex or whether they will continue to have access to other buildings there, a European official linked to the agency said.

The inspectors have worked there, living in guest quarters on the site, since July 2007.

The United States, Russia, Japan, China and South Korea have been engaged with North Korea in tortured six-country negotiations, which produced an agreement in February 2007 for North Korea to abandon its nuclear activities in exchange for aid and diplomatic incentives.

In July 2007, North Korea told the United States that it had shut down its nuclear reactor at the Yongbyon facility and readmitted an international inspection team. The move completed the first step toward reversing a four-year confrontation with the United States during which North Korea had made fuel for a small but potent arsenal of nuclear weapons.

The shutdown of the reactor and the return of the inspectors allowed the Bush administration to claim that its strategy of rejecting the North’s calls for bilateral talks and insisting on negotiations that included North Korea’s neighbors finally was working.

Since last November, North Korea had been dismantling the massive complex under the complicated disarmament-for-aid agreement.

But last month, North Korea announced that it had stopped dismantling the facilities to protest the failure of the United States to remove it from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Amid reports that Kim was ill, North Korea seemed to harden its position last Friday, saying that it no longer wanted to be removed from the terrorism list. “We can go our own way,” a Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying.

Officially, Washington has said that it will remove North Korea from the list after it permits inspectors to verify claims about its production of nuclear weapons.

International Herald Tribune | Elaine Sciolino | Wednesday, September 24, 2008