Word: yongbyon
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...THOSE WITH ACCESS TO IT, THE ENVIRONS OF Yongbyon, home to North Korea's main nuclear complex, can be a lovely place to visit. The country's founder, Kim Il Sung, so adored the region's azaleas and autumn foliage that he built a vacation home there, on a mountain overlooking the clear blue waters of the river near Yongbyon. Late last month Yongbyon was the site of a party of sorts, thrown by 100 North Korean officials and attended by the two U.N. weapons inspectors assigned to monitor the complex for signs that North Korea is trying to restart...
...North Korean scientists began removing seals and surveillance cameras from a cooling pond where spent fuel rods had been lying untouched. They reopened a nearby facility designed to extract plutonium, which can be used to fashion nuclear bombs, from the spent fuel. Appearing at the door of the Yongbyon guesthouse accommodating the two U.N. inspectors, a smiling North Korean official read aloud a letter informing them it was time to leave--immediately. The official volunteered that there were in fact two seats on the next Air Koryo flight from Pyongyang to Beijing. The inspectors left with 14 discs of surveillance...
...help he desperately needs to keep his citizens from starving?but also to wrestle a nonaggression treaty from the U.S. Kim figures he will have to get it while Washington remains occupied with Iraq. Last week's announcement that the country would reactivate its five-megawatt nuclear reactor in Yongbyon appeared to be another page from Kim's script. The facility was shut down under a 1994 agreement because it was capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. But with the American government suspending oil shipments, the North claims its obligations to the U.S. are now null and void...
...week Kang insisted the North would never permit special inspections, and would only start talking to the IAEA about its past nuclear program once the new reactors were more than 50% complete. Kang also said his government intended to keep the plutonium-rich fuel rods it removed from the Yongbyon reactor last May in North Korea instead of shipping them abroad...
Washington can afford to wait a few weeks. IAEA inspectors note that North Korea is finally taking better care of the fuel rods removed from the Yongbyon reactor; they can remain safely in their cooling ponds for several more months under present conditions and much longer if the water quality is improved. Bill Clinton has no interest in encouraging another big international crisis while American troops are deployed in Haiti. But the fear that Pyongyang is just buying time while it builds secret bombs weighs more heavily than ever on many minds in Washington. Clinton will need real results soon...