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Kyodo: N. Korea Enriching Uranium at Yongbyon

South Korea and the United States have shared intelligence that North Korea is operating a plant to produce a small amount of highly enriched uranium at its Yongbyon nuclear complex, a Seoul daily reported Wednesday.

”Despite North Korean authorities’ denial of existence of the uranium enrichment program, South Korea and the U.S. share an intelligence North Korea is running a plant for uranium enrichment,” a high-ranking South Korean source reportedly told the Dong-a Ilbo. [Kyodo News]

That would certainly help explain why North Korea’s “disclosure” documents about its plutonium reprocessing contained traces of enriched uranium. Yet on another level, this would make no sense: they could enrich uranium in any one of a thousand underground sites in North Korea, so why do it at the one place that’s most likely to attract international attention? If the North Koreans really wanted to put their uranium program in a place safe from the prying eyes and questions of diplomats and journalists, they’d put it in here.

3 Responses

  1. I think we know why – KJI’s regime knows that the nuclear question actually rallies more support from other similarly situated countries, giving DPRK the “international recognition”
    boost – on the other hand, exposing Camp 22 would invite unanimous international condemnation which is why KJI is taking drastic means to guard it as a precious “State Secret”.
    “Those who have lived to tell us about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff… Of all of North Korea’s numerous labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is the largest (as Josh discovered through Google Earth, the size of Washington D.C.), and almost certainly the most terrible, if only for the inhuman experiments witnesses say were done to the men, women, children, and even infants sent there (see Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22).
    Again, we have the intel assets…if we were “smart,” we’d use them to call him (KJI) on his bluff.

  2. The Secretary of State is taking a neutral position on HEU:

    “I don’t have any doubt that they would try whatever they possibly could. Have they? I don’t know that, and nobody else does, either,” Clinton told FOX News. “Clearly, there was some reason to believe that something having to do with highly enriched uranium — whether it was happening in North Korea, whether it had been imported into North Korea — was part of the information derived once we got inspectors into North Korea,” she said.

    Clinton said nobody can point to “any specific location” or “any specific outcome of whatever might have gone on, if anything did.”

    Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/02/20/clinton-knows-north-korea-uranium-program/