North Korea is showing a “very serious increase” in its ability to produce atomic weapons, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog said yesterday during a visit to Seoul.
North Korea is believed to operate multiple facilities for enriching uranium, a key step in making nuclear warheads, South Korea’s spy agency has said.
They include one at the Yongbyon nuclear site, which Pyongyang purportedly decommissioned after talks, but later reactivated in 2021.
Photo: EPA
“In our periodic assessments, we have been able to confirm that there’s a rapid increase in the operations” of the Yongbyon reactor, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi told reporters.
The agency also observed a rise in operations at Yongbyon’s reprocessing unit and light-water reactor, as well as the activation of other facilities, Grossi said.
“All that points to a very serious increase in the capabilities of [the] DPRK in the area of nuclear weapons production, which is estimated at a few dozen warheads,” he said, using the acronym of North Korea’s official name.
North Korea, which conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, is under rafts of UN sanctions for its banned weapons programs.
It has said that it would never surrender its nuclear weapons. It cut off access to IAEA inspectors in 2009.
The agency has noted the construction of a “new facility similar to the enrichment facility in Yongbyon,” Grossi said.
It was “not easy to calculate” any production increases without visiting the site.
However, “we consider, looking at external features of the facility, that there will be significant increase in the enrichment capacity of the DPRK,” he said.
Asked whether Russia was assisting North Korea’s nuclear development, Grossi said that the IAEA had not seen “anything in particular in that regard.”
South Korea has adjusted its electronic arrival card system to no longer list Taiwan as a part of China, a move that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said would help facilitate exchanges between the two sides. South Korea previously listed “Taiwan” as “Taiwan (China)” in the drop-down menus of its online arrival card system, where people had to fill out where they came from and their next destination. The ministry had requested South Korea make a revision and said it would change South Korea’s name on Taiwan’s online immigration system from “Republic of Korea” to “Korea (South),” should the issue not be
Tainan, Taipei and New Taipei City recorded the highest fines nationwide for illegal accommodations in the first quarter of this year, with fines issued in the three cities each exceeding NT$7 million (US$220,639), Tourism Administration data showed. Among them, Taipei had the highest number of illegal short-term rental units, with 410. There were 3,280 legally registered hotels nationwide in the first quarter, down by 14 properties, or 0.43 percent, from a year earlier, likely indicating operators exiting the market, the agency said. However, the number of unregistered properties rose to 1,174, including 314 illegal hotels and 860 illegal short-term rental
Both sides of the Taiwan Strait share a political foundation based on the “1992 consensus” and opposition to Taiwanese independence, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) today said during her meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Both sides of the Strait should plan and build institutionalized and sustainable mechanisms for dialogue and cooperation based on that foundation to make peaceful development across the Strait irreversible, she said. Peace is a shared moral value across the Strait, and both sides should move beyond political confrontation to seek institutionalized solutions to prevent war, she said. Mutually beneficial cross-strait relations are what the
ECONOMIC COERCION: Such actions are often inconsistently applied, sometimes resumed, and sometimes just halted, the Presidential Office spokeswoman said The government backs healthy and orderly cross-strait exchanges, but such arrangements should not be made with political conditions attached and never be used as leverage for political maneuvering or partisan agendas, Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo (郭雅慧) said yesterday. Kuo made the remarks after China earlier in the day announced 10 new “incentive measures” for Taiwan, following a landmark meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) in Beijing on Friday. The measures, unveiled by China’s Xinhua news agency, include plans to resume individual travel by residents of Shanghai and China’s Fujian
RSS