N. Korea's reactor restarting to lead to 2nd nuclear test: expert

N. Korea's reactor restarting to lead to 2nd nuclear test: expert
By Hwang Doo-hyong

WASHINGTON, May 15 (Yonhap) -- North Korea may conduct a second nuclear test in
the near future with weapons-grade plutonium produced from restarting its nuclear
facilities, a U.S. expert said Friday.

"Although it must have been tempted to conduct a second test after the limited
success in October in 2006, North Korea has been constrained by its meager
plutonium inventory and by the threat of international sanctions," said Siegfried
Hecker, a professor at Stanford University, in an article in the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists.
"If it had another 8 kilograms available, it could decide to conduct another
test," Hecker said. "The addition of one more bomb to Pyongyang's small arsenal
would not represent a greatly enhanced threat, yet a more sophisticated arsenal
would."
North Korea has said it would restart its nuclear reactor to protest the U.N.
Security Council's sanctions of three North Korean firms imposed after the
North's April 5 rocket launch. The reactor had been disabled under an
international denuclearization deal.
Pyongyang has also threatened to boycott the six-party talks and conduct further
nuclear and ballistic missile tests unless the Security Council apologizes for
the condemnation of the launch, which the North insists was for the purpose of
orbiting a satellite.
North Korea detonated its first nuclear device in 2006, a test that the U.S. and
its allies see as a partial success, and fired long-range rockets in 1998, 2006
and 2009.
Hecker's remarks are in line with those of Gary Samore, U.S. President Barack
Obama's policy coordinator on the nonproliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, who recently said that he believes North Korea will conduct another
nuclear test as it has threatened to do.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, however, has dismissed the North's threat
as "rhetoric."
Hecker, who visited Pyongyang several times, said that North Korea needs another
test to refine its nuclear arsenal.
"To make better bombs, particularly to miniaturize them and have confidence to
mount them on missiles, North Korea would have to conduct one or more nuclear
tests," he said.
U.S. intelligence authorities believe North Korea has several nuclear warheads,
but has been unable to scale them down as missile payloads.
North Korea declared last year that its has 30 kilograms of plutonium, although
the U.S. estimates the number at about 50 kilograms.
On the North's plutonium production capacity, Hecker said, "The best North Korea
could do is to separate approximately 8 kilograms of bomb-grade plutonium by
October 2009, and produce at most another 6 kilograms of plutonium per year for
the next two to four years with its existing stocks of fresh fuel."
North Korea has about 12,000 spent fuel rods extracted from its reactor and in
stock since the six-party nuclear deal was struck in 2005.
The scholar also would not preclude the possibility of the North having a
separate uranium-based nuclear program.
"We cannot rule out that North Korea has operated undeclared uranium facilities,
most likely outside of Yongbyon," he said. "The alleged export of nuclear
technologies, possibly including uranium to Libya and Syria, point to the
potential existence of such facilities."
hdh@yna.co.kr
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