North Korea Nuke test shook world, says U.N. nuclear chief
Pastor Dale Morgan
North Korea Nuke test shook world, says U.N. nuclear chief*
Reuters
Tuesday, December 5, 2006; 2:21 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korea's nuclear test shook international
safeguards and highlighted the need to wrest control of nuclear material
processing from individual states, the chief of the U.N. atomic watchdog
said on Tuesday.
"The DPRK test is a clear setback to the nuclear non-proliferation
regime," Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, told an audience in Beijing where he is due to meet
senior officials.
"The recent nuclear test by the DPRK brought the need to control the
spread of enrichment and processing capabilities sharply into focus."
The DPRK, or Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is the formal name
of North Korea, which drew international condemnation for its October 9
test and has since agreed to return to six-party disarmament talks.
Despite a flurry of diplomacy, no date has been set for those talks,
which involve the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia
and were expected by the end of 2006.
The radioactive fuel used in nuclear reactors can also be refined into
weapons-grade material -- a step Western countries say Iran is aiming to
master -- and ElBaradei said countries with such processing abilities
could quickly develop atomic weapons.
The spread of civilian nuclear power in coming decades should be
protected by placing atomic material processing under a multinational
group that would issue fuel only for securely peaceful purposes,
ElBaradei told the audience at Tsinghua University, where he received an
honorary doctorate.
Growing numbers of countries are embracing nuclear power to escape from
energy shortages and pollution, and many Asian countries have ambitious
plans to build atomic plants, he said.
Sixteen of the 29 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide are in
developing countries, and China alone plans to expand its nuclear output
fivefold by 2020, ElBaradei said.
But that expansion needed to be accompanied by strict safety measures
and a reworking of international safeguards to prevent atomic materials
from spilling into nuclear weapons or terrorist hands, he added.
"We have to strengthen the non-proliferation regime," he said. "We have
to multi-nationalize the reprocessing and enrichment, because if a
country does not have highly-enriched uranium or plutonium, they cannot
develop nuclear weapons."