North Korea threatens South, restarts plutonium plant
Pastor Dale Morgan
North Korea threatens South, restarts plutonium plant*
By Jon Herskovitz
Reuters
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 1:36 AM
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea, facing international sanction for this
week's nuclear test, threatened on Wednesday to attack the South after
Seoul joined a U.S.-led initiative to check vessels suspected of
carrying equipment for weapons of mass destruction.
The threat came after South Korean media reported Pyongyang had
restarted a plant that makes weapons-grade plutonium.
President Barack Obama is working to form a united response to Monday's
nuclear test, widely denounced as a major threat to stability that
violates U.N. resolutions and brings the reclusive North closer to
having a reliable nuclear bomb.
A North Korean army spokesman reiterated that the country was no longer
bound by the armistice signed at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War
because Washington had ignored its responsibility as a signatory by
drawing Seoul into the anti-proliferation effort.
"Any hostile act against our peaceful vessels including search and
seizure will be considered an unpardonable infringement on our
sovereignty and we will immediately respond with a powerful military
strike," the spokesman for the North's army was quoted as saying by the
official KCNA news agency.
South Korea announced on Tuesday it was joining the naval exercise,
called the Proliferation Security Initiative.
An angry Pyongyang, which relies on arms sales for cash, had said it
considered such a move an act of war.
The nuclear test has raised concern about Pyongyang spreading weapons to
other countries or groups. Washington has accused it of trying try to
sell nuclear know-how to Syria and others.
The rival Koreas have fought two deadly naval clashes in 1999 and 2002
near a disputed maritime border off their west coast and the North has
threatened in the past year to strike South Korean vessels in those
Yellow Sea waters.
Pyongyang also test-fired a third short-range missile late on Tuesday
after it added to tensions with the launch of two others earlier in the
day, the South's Yonhap news agency quoted a unnamed government source
as saying.
The secretive state appears to have made good on a threat issued in
April of restarting a facility at its Yongbyon nuclear plant that
extracts plutonium, South Korea's largest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, reported.
"There are various indications that reprocessing facilities in Yongbyon
resumed operation (and) have been detected by U.S. surveillance
satellite, and these including steam coming out of the facility," it
quoted an unnamed government source as saying.
The Soviet-era Yongbyon plant was being taken apart under a six-country
disarmament-for-aid deal and there were no signs yet that the North,
which conducted its only prior nuclear test in October 2006, was again
separating plutonium.
Seoul's financial markets, which had fallen in the wake of the nuclear
test, rose on Wednesday though traders said investors were still nervous
about when the North would try to be more provocative and ratchet up
tension in the region.
KIM'S HEALTH, SUCCESSION IN FOCUS
Analysts say Pyongyang's military grandstanding is partly aimed at
tightening leader Kim Jong-il's grip on power so he can better engineer
his succession and divert attention from the country's weak economy,
which has fallen into near ruin since he took over in 1994.
Many speculate Kim's suspected stroke in August raised concerns about
succession and he wants his third son to be the next leader of Asia's
only communist dynasty.
The country, which has a history of using military threats to squeeze
concessions out of global powers, may have ramped up its provocations
early in Obama's presidency in order to have more cards to play during
his time in office.
There may be little the international community can do to deter the
North, which has been punished for years by sanctions and is so poor it
relies on aid to feed its 23 million people.
A Treasury Department official said it was weighing possible action to
isolate the North financially.
A 2005 U.S. clampdown on a Macau bank suspected of laundering money for
Pyongyang effectively cut the country off from the international banking
system.
Japan's upper house of parliament denounced the test and said in a
resolution the government should step up its sanctions.
North Koreans celebrated, with a rally in the capital of top cadres,
KCNA said.
"The nuclear test was a grand undertaking to protect the supreme
interests of the DPRK (North Korea) and defend the dignity and
sovereignty of the country and nation," it quoted a communist party
official as saying.
North Korea's meager supply of fissile material is likely down to enough
for five to seven bombs after Monday's test, experts have said. It could
probably extract enough plutonium from spent rods at the plant for
another bomb's worth of plutonium by the end of this year.
The North's next step may to be resume operations at all of Yongbyon,
with experts saying it could take the North up to a year to reverse
disablement steps. Once running, it can produce enough plutonium for a
bomb a year.
The hermit state has also threatened to launch a long-range ballistic
missile if the Security Council does not apologize for tightening
sanctions to punish it for an April launch widely seen as a missile test
that violated U.N. measures.
(Additional reporting by Jack Kim, Rhee So-eui and Kim Junghyun in Seoul
and Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo; Editing by Dean Yates)