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New doubts over North Korean weapons: report

The US has obtained new intelligence that raises questions about whether North Korea pursued an alternative route to producing a nuclear weapon, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

Fresh traces of highly enriched uranium were found on 18,000 pages of records from North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor that were provided by Pyongyang to the US last month, the Post said, citing sources familiar with the intelligence findings.

The documents date back to 1987, the Post said. North Korea provided them to help the administration of US President George W. Bush verify the amount of plutonium it produced in the reactor.

The newspaper said North Korea next week plans to submit its long-awaited declaration on its nuclear programs, which is expected to disclose that its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon produced about 37kg of plutonium. North Korean officials are expected to blow up the cooling tower attached to the facility on Friday or Saturday, the Post said.

Plutonium offers a different route to producing a nuclear weapon than uranium enrichment, the Post said. North Korea has insisted that it had no uranium-enrichment program.

The new uranium enrichment data is preliminary, the Post said. Analysts also do not know how the documents might have been handled and how they could have come into contact with a possible enrichment program.

Meanwhile, countries negotiating with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program are considering easing their demands to break a stalemate in the talks, Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said on Friday.

Komura said some countries wanted to relax the requirements for what North Korea should include in a declaration of its nuclear programs and weapons.

“The point is, the purpose [of the negotiations] is not a declaration per se, but a complete abandonment [of North Korea’s nuclear weapons] and denuclearization,” Komura said. “There is a view that it is better to get things going and out of the stalemate to achieve the goal of denuclearization, even if it takes a slight easing of the requirements for now.”

Komura suggested that a declaration that omits details about North Korea’s nuclear weapons could be sufficient for some countries in the talks in order to move the process forward. The talks — involving Japan, China, Russia, the US and the two Koreas — have been stalled since last year over North Korea’s failure to provide a full declaration of its nuclear programs by a December deadline.

Komura made the comments in response to a reporter’s question about a media report that negotiators from Japan, the US and South Korea had agreed to relax the requirements. He denied that Japan had given a green light, but added that Tokyo planned to discuss the idea with other countries.

Chief negotiators from Japan, the US and South Korea met on Thursday in Tokyo and reaffirmed the need to push the denuclearization process forward.

A day earlier, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she expected North Korea would soon provide an account of its nuclear activities. If Washington is satisfied with the report, it is expected to take North Korea off its list of terror-sponsoring nations.
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