North Korean Nuclear Ability Seen to Far Outpace Iran’s

The Obama administration has concluded that North Korea’s new plant to enrich nuclear fuel uses technology that is “significantly more advanced” than what Iran has struggled over two decades to assemble, according to senior administration and intelligence officials.
In carefully worded public comments in recent days, both senior American and South Korean officials have also argued that the the new plant, a facility shown to a Stanford University expert last month, could not have been constructed so quickly unless there was a sophisticated network of other secret sites — and perhaps a fully running uranium enrichment plant — elsewhere in the country.

These conclusions strongly suggest that North Korea has evaded the many layers of economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council and America’s allies in Asia. The conclusions also greatly complicate the task for American diplomats — including a senior delegation of State Department and White House officials who left for China on Tuesday — who have been struggling for weeks now to fashion a plan to contain North Korea’s nuclear advances and prevent a repetition of its recent attack on the South.

North Korea already has the fuel for six to a dozen weapons and has conducted two nuclear tests, a capability it developed from harvesting plutonium from a recently shuttered nuclear reactor. The uranium enrichment facility could give the country another pathway to increasing its nuclear arsenal.

But in interviews American officials said that was not their main concern.

Instead, they are worried that the real intent of showing off the new capability to the Stanford expert, Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and two of his Stanford colleagues, was to advertise North Korea’s wares. Dr. Hecker said he was “stunned” that North Korea had succeeded in building the plant so quickly.

Last Friday, Gary Samore, President Obama’s chief nuclear adviser, said for the first time that “the North Korean program appears to be much more advanced in and efficient than the Iranian program, which is running into problems.” Reports from international inspectors indicate that the Iranians are experimenting with advanced centrifuges, but have not installed them on an industrial scale, despite years of efforts. Those efforts have been slowed by sabotage, officials said.

“The U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to try to make sure that we complicate matters for them,” Mr. Samore added.

After alluding to a secret North Korean effort to help Syria build an entire nuclear reactor, which was ultimately destroyed by Israel in a 2007 bombing raid, Mr. Samore said that the new North Korean centrifuges could be attractive to other nations. He added that “a critical element” of American strategy must now be “to insure that the North Koreans don’t sell to the Middle East.”

But that has been attempted before, and efforts to halt shipments have been spotty at best. According to secret State Department cables made public by Wikileaks, the United States believes North Korea successfully shipped 19 advanced missiles to Iran five years ago, and that other technology has passed through the Beijing airport on its way to Iran.

Three weeks after North Korea’s nuclear revelations, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea have been unable to fashion a response, even a common agreement to crack down on further transactions. “The Chinese admit this was a huge violation of North Korea’s previous commitments to denuclearize,” one senior official said last week, “but they don’t say what we should do about that, other than to re-enter the same old negotiations again, which we are not going to do.”

A week ago, in Beijing, several Chinese officials and academics who deal with North Korean issues argued it would be counterproductive to seek more sanctions or resolutions at the United Nations Security Council — all efforts that have been tried before, and that have largely failed.

“It only makes them speed up,” one former senior Chinese official said.

American, South Korean and Chinese officials have all acknowledged in recent days that despite their intense focus on the North’s efforts to obtain uranium enrichment technology, they all missed the assembly of the plant at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear complex. The area is under intense scrutiny from American satellites, but the new plant was built inside an old structure — and satellites cannot see through the roof. Intelligence officials have said in the past that they have few human spies in North Korea with access to the most sensitive facilities.

Oftentimes, breakthroughs have come through cooperation with allied intelligence services. It was South Korea that first notified Washington, a decade ago, that North Korea was buying components for uranium enrichment. It was the head of Israel’s Mossad who came to Washington in 2007 and dropped photographs of the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria on the coffee table of Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser.

But American intelligence officials argue that they have documented North Korea’s efforts for years, and the revelation of the new facility only confirmed what has long appeared in intelligence reports. “It’s no surprise to anyone that they have been working on uranium enrichment — we’ve known that for a decade,” said one senior official involved in the administration’s counter-proliferation efforts. “The surprise is that they have succeeded in technologies that are still driving the Iranians crazy.”

They caution that it is not clear the North Koreans can get the new facility running: Dr. Hecker was given a quick, carefully limited view, and could not confirm the centrifuges were running. But what he saw was enough to convince him, and American intelligence experts, that the facility could not have been built that fast unless a network of centrifuge construction facilities and uranium processing plants existed elsewhere.

“It is likely that North Korea had been pursuing an enrichment capability long before the April, 2009 date it now claims,” Glyn Davies, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, said last week. If so, he said, there was a clear likelihood that North Korea “has built other uranium enrichment-related facilities in its territory.”