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U.S. Expert Unconvinced on North Korea Nukes
EFLAn American nuclear weapons expert who recently visited North Koreaâs main nuclear complex said Wednesday he saw no convincing evidence that Pyongyang can build a plutonium-based nuclear device, but it most likely can make plutonium. Since they havenât tested one, Iâve lways been skeptical as well....but plutonium in a dirty bomb would be nasty Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos, N.M., nuclear research laboratory, also said he remained unconvinced that the North Koreans could convert any such nuclear device into a nuclear weapon. Hecker, who visited North Koreaâs secretive Yongbyon nuclear site on Jan. 8 as part of an unofficial U.S. delegation, was speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The North Koreans claimed that day that they had reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods to extract plutonium, Hecker told the committee. He said the visiting delegation could not definitively substantiate the reprocessing claim, but said he saw evidence that the North Koreans had the technical expertise to do that. Another former official on the trip, former State Department official Jack Pritchard, wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece published Wednesday that all 8,000 rods had been removed from the nuclear site, in what Pritchard called evidence that the communist nation may have restarted efforts to build atomic bombs. Just in time for famine and unrest...wonder if they could feed all their starving with the money spent on their international mischief Hecker said he told senior North Korean officials that "there is nothing that we saw at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center that would allow me to assess whether or not the DPRK possessed a nuclear deterrent if that meant a nuclear device or nuclear weapon." Posted by: Frank G 2004-01-21 |
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