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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (353844)	2/5/2003 5:40:05 PM
From: steve dietrich	Respond to of 769667

Talk about "mocking the rest of the world": N.Korea Ups Stakes in Crisis, Says Reactor Started 52 minutes ago Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo! By Paul Eckert SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) said on Wednesday it had restarted and put on a "normal footing" the atomic facilities at the center of its suspected nuclear weapons program. Reuters Photo Reuters Photo Slideshow: North And South Korea Space Shuttle Columbia Special Coverage The move raises the stakes in a crisis Pyongyang said the United States had triggered by threatening the isolated communist state. "The DPRK (North Korea) is now putting the operation of its nuclear facilities for the production of electricity on a normal footing after their restart," said a statement by the North Korean Foreign Ministry carried on the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). North Korea's latest defiant move came as international attention was focused Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) address to the U.N. Security Council designed to persuade the council and world opinion that U.N. weapons inspectors cannot disarm Iraq and that war may be the only resort. The late-night statement was issued five days after U.S. officials said American satellite surveillance had shown North Korea was moving fuel rods around the reactor complex at Yongbyon, including possibly some of the 8,000 spent fuel rods that experts consider a key step in building bombs. But the U.S. officials added that there was no sign that crucial reprocessing of those spent rods had begun -- a step that would enable North Korea to begin bomb-making in weeks, adding to the arsenal of two bombs the West suspects it has already built. "VERY SERIOUS DEVELOPMENT" After Pyongyang's latest announcement, a U.S. official said Washington was calling on North Korea to close the facilities. The State Department official, who asked not to be named, said, "We have seen the reports. If true, this would be a very serious development." The official was using language approved at the State Department. "North Korea's actions are in defiance of the international community's calls for it to respond to our shared concerns about its nuclear weapons program and they will serve to further its international self-isolation," he said. International Atomic Energy Agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said, without inspectors in North Korea the IAEA cannot certify any alleged activity. "If this is true, the IAEA deplores the operation of any nuclear facility without IAEA inspections," she said. North Korea's statement did not mention the fuel rods, and repeated North Korea's assertion that it had ended the freeze on its nuclear reactor to produce electricity. "The DPRK government has already solemnly declared that its nuclear activity would be limited to the peaceful purposes including the production of electricity at the present stage," KCNA quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying. Impoverished North Korea suffers from crippling power shortages, but nuclear experts reject Pyongyang's electricity argument because the reactor at Yongbyon is a small military research reactor with insignificant power generation capacity. North Korea rejected the IAEA's plans to refer the nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council next week because it had already quit the IAEA, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the spokesman said. "The DPRK does not care about whether the UN Security Council discusses the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula or not," the ministry spokesman said. "But if it wants to handle this issue, it should fairly call into question the responsibility of the U.S. which is chiefly to blame for the outbreak of this issue and for the strained situation." BLAMES US FOR CRISIS IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in Vienna on Monday that the agency's board of governors would meet on February 12 and was likely to hand the nuclear crisis over to the U.N. Security Council. He said the council was not expected to recommend sanctions or military action against North Korea. The statement said the United States had triggered the nuclear crisis with President Bush (news - web sites)'s speech last year branding North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil" and with American plans calling for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against rogue states. "If the U.N. Security Council responsible for the issue of world peace and security does not call the U.S. wrong-Korean policy to task, this organization will turn out to be partial and the DPRK will, accordingly, not recognize it," it said. The crisis erupted last October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to enriching uranium in violation of a 1994 accord, under which it froze its nuclear program in exchange for two energy-generating reactors and free fuel. Since December, North Korea has expelled IAEA inspectors, withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), restarted a mothballed nuclear complex capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium and threatened to resume missile tests. North Korea's state media pounced on comments by U.S. officials that Washington had put ships and planes on standby for a precautionary deployment to the western Pacific to deter any aggression or adventurism by Pyongyang during a war in Iraq. "The war hysteria of the U.S. imperialists, keen to isolate and stifle the DPRK (North Korea) under the pretext of the nuclear issue, has reached a more reckless phase," the North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. Failure (Reuters) More Top Stories Stories · U.S. Economy in Worst Hiring Slump in 20 Years (The New York Times) Free News Alerts -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. Copyright © 2003 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. Questions or Comments Privacy Policy -Terms of Service