Word: plutonium
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Some in Washington say Clinton should just order out the B-52s to bomb the North's plutonium reprocessing plant and two reactors, neatly destroying the danger. But that is unrealistic: a strike could spread a big radioactive cloud over the peninsula, miss hidden weapons or start a devastating war between North and South Korea. A more practical tactic would be the imposition of economic sanctions by the United Nations -- but even if China, long friendly to the North, did not veto an embargo, Pyongyang might feel cornered and lash...
...doomsday clock, stopped just before midnight as the cold war ended, is still ticking. Rand Corp. study for the U.S. Pentagon warns that the world will accumulate enough plutonium -- the radioactive ingredient used in many nuclear warheads -- to build 87,000 "primitive" bombs by 2003. Weapons dismantled by the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. will account for 199 tons of the lethal substance. Adding to the problem will be more than 300 tons of plutonium extracted from spent uranium fuel retrieved from nuclear power plants. "Separated plutonium held in inventory," says the report, "could be diverted and reworked to make...
...sites to which the IAEA demanded access last February, Pyongyang is now refusing to allow even routine monitoring of five declared nuclear sites at Yongbyon, 65 miles north of the capital, and two other sites elsewhere. At a 5-MW power reactor whose fuel core could be mined for plutonium to make bombs, IAEA inspectors are not being allowed to reload spent surveillance cameras. Three smaller research facilities due for inspection have been off limits since May 1992. A uranium fuel-fabrication plant slated for examination every three months has not been seen for more than a year. Last August...
...North didn't start behaving. But the West decided to keep negotiating instead. "We're not talking in terms of a deadline," says an IAEA spokesman. Reason: fear of driving Pyongyang into a corner from which it would fight its way out. The North Koreans have threatened to resume plutonium reprocessing and their atomic-weapons program if the U.S. breaks off talks over the stalled inspections. That threat seems real. Even the flashlight search, as well as satellite photos, showed the North preparing to resume plutonium reprocessing...
...fear a violent response. Also, Pyongyang diplomats have said privately that any attack on their nuclear facilities would trigger an invasion of the South. None of these risks of escalation are worth taking yet, since Western intelligence analysts are fairly sure that the North has only small amounts of plutonium and no operational bomb. Further, says a State Department official, "none of our main interlocutors on this issue -- South Korea, Russia, Japan, China -- think negotiations have been exhausted...