A team of United Nations inspectors arrived yesterday to further investigate South Korea's past unauthorized experiments with uranium and plutonium as North Korea reacted by vowing not to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
The four-member International Atomic Energy Agency team (IAEA) is on a new week-long mission to visit two state nuclear centers and interview scientists.
Its initial inspection began three weeks ago, after Seoul's revelations that its scientists secretly extracted plutonium in 1982 and enriched uranium in 2000.
South Korea says the lab experiments had been for scientific purposes irrelevant to weapons programs. It denies seeking or possessing nuclear arms.
But the case has already dam-aged multinational efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs.
The chances are slim for a resumption of six-nation talks on the issue because Pyongyang has hardened its position and cited Seoul's nuclear activities.
The (North) Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Saturday denounced the US' double standards toward the two Koreas.
Six-party talks could not be resumed unless Washington changed its policy toward Pyongyang, KCNA said.
"It is self-evident that the resumption of the talks can no longer be discussed unless the US drops its hostile policy based on double standards toward the DPRK (North Korea) and that the latter can never dismantle its nuclear deterrent force," it said.
A North Korean spokesman said on Friday that Pyongyang "can never sit at the table to negotiate its nuclear weapons program unless the truth about the secret nuclear experiments in South Korea is fully probed."
China, host of the six-way talks, admitted on Thursday it would be difficult to hold the talks by the end of September as planned.
But Seoul urged Pyongyang to return to the talks, which bring together the two Koreas, China, the US, Russia and Japan.
"The (South Korean) nuclear experiments have nothing to do with the North Korean nuclear issue and it must have no impact on the six-nation talks," foreign ministry spokesman Lee Kyu-Hyung said on Friday.
South Korea, a nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signatory, on Saturday made a fresh pledge not to develop or own nuclear weapons.
A US State Department spokesman has said Washington sees the South's research as "laboratory experiments" and not as nuclear weapons activities.
The stand-off over North Korea's nuclear ambitions flared in October 2002, when Washington accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium, violating a 1994 agreement. Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program but has restarted its plutonium program.
Seoul officials refused to comment on the itinerary of the UN nuclear inspectors who headed on Sunday for the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute in Daejeon, 160km south of Seoul.
Scientists at the state institute produced 150kg of uranium metal in 1982 in undeclared activities and this was used in 2000 to produce the enriched uranium.
They also admitted to having extracted a miniscule amount of plutonium from 2.5kg of fuel rods in secret research in 1982.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei last week expressed "serious concern" about the activities.
South Korea has the world's sixth-largest civilian nuclear industry, operating 19 nuclear power plants that produce 40 percent of the nation's energy needs.
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