Word: yongbyon
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...canceled talks scheduled for this week with North Korea after Pyongyang refused to allow international inspectors full access to its Yongbyon nuclear facility. Washington also reportedly decided Saturday to reschedule joint military exercises with South Korea, which had been suspended. By week's end talks between archenemies North and South Korea collapsed...
After an 11-month standoff, North Korea has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that it will permit inspection of seven nuclear sites. Not included in the arrangement: two sites in its Yongbyon complex believed to be waste dumps for weapons-grade plutonium. In a positive response, the South Korean Foreign Minister, Han Sung Joo, said the U.S. should reconsider its proposed deployment of Patriot missiles in South Korea...
What Washington does know is that the North Koreans have extracted some plutonium -- the raw material for weapons -- from its 5-megawatt nuclear power plant at Yongbyon, but the U.S. does not know exactly how much. Experts think it could be as much as 12kg (26 lbs.), which would be enough for one or two bombs -- if Pyongyang's engineers are able to build them...
...this week that North Korea's violation of international nuclear safeguards is "continuing and widening." In addition to blocking inspections of two secret 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...
North Korea is currently the gravest concern. Pyongyang signed the nonproliferation treaty in 1985 but grudgingly agreed only last year to allow inspectors to examine what it insisted was its purely civilian nuclear-power industry. When the monitors showed up, they confirmed intelligence reports that the installation at Yongbyon, north of the capital, had been processing plutonium at least since...