North Korea is operating four uranium enrichment facilities, a top South Korean official said yesterday, adding to outside assessments that it has multiple covert atomic plants along with a widely known site near the capital, Pyongyang.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has called for a rapid expansion of his country’s nuclear weapons program and recently said he would never make the arms a negotiating point in response to overtures by US President Donald Trump.
South Korean Minister of Unification Chung Dong-young said that uranium enrichment centrifuges at the four facilities — which would include the known site at Yongbyon, about 100km north of Pyongyang — are running every day and stressed the urgency to stop the North’s nuclear program.
Photo: Korean Central News Agency, Korea News Service via AP
Chung did not elaborate further on the location of the other, undeclared nuclear sites.
He cited an assessment that North Korea possesses 2,000kg of highly enriched uranium. He first said that was based on intelligence agencies’ estimates, but the ministry later clarified it was attributed to civilian experts.
If confirmed, the amount would also signal a sharp increase in North Korea’s stockpile of nuclear material.
“Even at this very hour, North Korea’s uranium centrifuges are operating at four sites,” Chung told local reporters.
“Only five to six kilograms of plutonium is enough to build a single nuclear bomb,” he said, adding that 2,000kg of highly enriched uranium, which could be reserved solely for plutonium production, would be “enough to make an enormous number of nuclear weapons.”
Chung said that “stopping North Korea’s nuclear development is an urgent matter,” but added that sanctions would not be effective and that the only solution lies in a summit between Pyongyang and Washington.
In 2018, Stanford University academics, including nuclear physicist Siegfried Hecker who had previously visited the Yongbyon complex, said the North had about 250kg to 500kg of highly enriched uranium, sufficient for 25 to 30 nuclear devices.
Nuclear weapons can be built using either highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and North Korea has facilities to produce both at Yongbyon.
Last year, North Korea released photographs of what it said was a uranium enrichment facility, the first such disclosure since it showed the one at Yongbyon to Hecker and others in 2010.
The location and other details of the facility in the photographs remain unknown.
Additional reporting by AFP
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