Dec 26, 2002 4 min read

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North Korea has let a U.N. watchdog agency send more inspectors to its nuclear facilities, even as communist engineers move freely around a reactor in violation of arms control agreements, officials in the South said Wednesday. North Korea’s willingness to publicly flout its international commitments suggests it is trying to force itself onto Washington’s agenda to win an oft-stated goal: talks with its longtime foe about a nonaggression treaty.

Possibly as part of that strategy, North Korea has stepped up its anti-American rhetoric in recent days, warning that U.S. policy was leading the region to the “brink of nuclear war.”

The Bush administration, however, has rejected negotiations with North Korea unless it abandons nuclear activities and says the North’s moves to reactivate the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon amount to blackmail.

The standoff has raised fears of another nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula like one in 1994 that some experts say nearly escalated into war.

The United States fears the plant – whose operations were frozen in a deal that averted the earlier crisis – could be used to make nuclear weapons and has urged the North not to reactivate it. Intelligence analysts believe North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs that were made from the reactor in the 1990s.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency increased the number of inspectors at the Yongbyon reactor from two to three since North Korea began removing U.N. seals and disabling surveillance cameras at facilities this week, South Korean officials said.

“The organization took the step to strengthen eye checks of nuclear facilities,” Chon Young-woo, a Foreign Ministry official, was quoted as saying by The Korea Times, a South Korean newspaper.

An IAEA spokesman at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, could not be reached for comment.

Chon said that the inspectors were conducting daily checks without interference from North Korean authorities.

However, the IAEA’s director, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, has said that without the seals and other safeguards, his agency cannot guarantee that North Korea is not diverting nuclear material for the production of weapons.

Although there was no new activity at a reprocessing lab or a plutonium fuel rod factory early Wednesday, the South Korean news agency Yonhap quoted an unidentified South Korean government official as saying: “North Koreans are freely moving in and out of the unsealed nuclear reactor” at Yongbyon.

Washington’s preparations for a possible war with Iraq may have given new urgency to North Korea’s demands for a nonaggression treaty, though the destitute North is also believed eager to extract economic benefits from any deal.

The nuclear facilities were sealed under a 1994 agreement in which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear development in exchange for oil from the United States and its allies.

North Korea moved swiftly to restart the reactor after the United States cut off oil shipments to the energy-starved nation in an effort to pressure the North into abandoning a separate nuclear weapons program based on uranium enrichment.

North Korean officials would need “a month or two” to make the Soviet-designed, five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon operational, the IAEA says.

U.S. officials say North Korea’s claim that it needs the facility to generate electricity is false because there is no use for plutonium other than trying to build a nuclear bomb.

There are 8,000 spent fuel rods at the facility, enough to make several atomic bombs within months. The IAEA said it did not appear the North Koreans had removed any rods.

President Bush and South Korea’s president-elect, Roh Moo-hyun, will exchange special envoys next month to discuss North Korea, Roh’s chief spokesman, Lee Nak-yon, said Wednesday.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly is likely to visit South Korea, and Roh’s envoy will return the visit, he said.

In Russia, which has maintained friendly ties with the North Korean regime in Pyongyang, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov expressed concern over the North’s nuclear program, saying it “negatively affects the situation on the Korean Peninsula.”

“In these conditions, Pyongyang’s cooperation with the IAEA takes on special significanc We call on North Korea to cooperate with the agency,” Losyukov said.