The US. has rejected recent North Korean calls for bilateral talks concerning a non- aggression pact, insisting that only six-party talks that also include the People’s Republic of
China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea are acceptable.
A document leaked in March 2001 showed that the U.S. Government was willing to
use nuclear weapons against North Korea. North Korea argues that its nuclear-weapons
program is no more than a valuable deterrent against aggression by the U.S.
Plutonium
Concern focuses around two reactors at Yong by on, both of them small power stations using Magnox technology. The smaller (5MWe) was completed in 1986 and has since produced possibly 8,000 spent fuel elements. Construction of the larger plant (5OMWe) commenced in 1984 but in 2003 was still incomplete. This larger plant is based on the declassified blueprints of the Calder Hall power reactors used to produce plutonium for the UK nuclear weapons program.
It has also been suggested that small amounts of plutonium could have been
produced in a Russian-supplied IRT 2000 heavy-water moderated research reactor
completed in 1967, but there are no recorded safeguards violations with respect to this plant.
On March 12, 1993, North Korea said that it planned to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refused to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites. By 1994, the United States believed that North Korea had enough reprocessed plutonium to produce about 10 bombs with the amount of plutonium increasing. Faced with diplomatic pressure and the threat of American military airstrikes against the reactor, North Korea agreed to dismantle its plutonium program as part of the Agreed Framework in which South Korea and the United States would provide North Korea with light water reactors and fuel oil until those reactors could be completed. Because the light water reactors would require enriched uranium to be imported from outside North Korea, the amount of reactor fuel and waste could be more easily tracked making it more difficult to divert nuclear waste to be reprocessed into plutonium.
Enriched Uranium
However, with the abandonment of its plutonium program, North Korea secretly began an enriched uranium program. Pakistan, through Abdul Qadeer Khan, supplied key technology and information to North Korea in exchange for missile technology around 1997, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
This program was publicized in October 2002 when the United States asked North Korean officials about the program, and, according to the U.S., North Korea admitted the existence of the program. According to North Korea, it replied that it is entitled” to have such a program or “an even more powerful one” to deter a pre-emptive U.S. attack, unless the U.S. agreed to a non-aggression pact. (see below)
Although the Agreed Framework specifically prohibited then-existing plutonium programs, not uranium, the U.S. argued North Korea violated the “spirit” of the agreement. In December 2002, the United States terminated the 1994 Agreed Framework, suspending fuel oil shipments.
North Korea responded by announcing plans to reactivate a dormant nuclear fuel
processing program and power plant north of Pyongyang. North Korea soon thereafter
expelled U.N. inspectors and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Delivery Systems
North Korea’s ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction to a hypothetical target is somewhat limited by its missile technology. As of 2005, North Korea total range with its No Dong missiles is only 1,300 km, enough to reach South Korea, Japan, and parts of China and Russia, but not to the United States or Europe. It is not known if this missile is actually capable of carrying the nuclear weapons North Korea has so far developed. They have also developed the Taepo Dong 1 missile, which has a range of 2,000 km, but it is not yet in full deployment. With the development of the Taepo Dong 2 missile, with an expected range of 5,000-6,000 km, North Korea could hypothetically deliver a warhead to almost all countries in South East Asia, and parts of Alaska. Former CIA director George Tenet has claimed that the Taepo Dong 2 could deliver a small payload even to the western parts of the Lower 48 states of the U.S., though with low accuracy.
Since North Korea could be seen as a threat to the region, the U.S. established the
“Six Party Talks”, inviting North Korea to join the United States, Russia, Japan, China and
South Korea.
Biological and Chemical Weapons
North Korea is widely believed to possess a substantial arsenal of chemical weapons. It reportedly acquired the technology necessary to produce tabun and mustard gas as early as the 1950s, and now possesses a full arsenal of nerve agent and other advanced varieties, and has developed the means to launch them in artillery shells. North Korea has a large artillery arsenal within range of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, and a chemical attack could cause a very large number of casualties. This threat is, until the development of nuclear weapons, the North’s most potent insurance against an attack from the South.
North Korea has expended considerable resources on equipping its army with
chemical-protection equipment.
North Korea acceded to the Biological Weapons Convention in 1987, the Geneva
Protocol on January 4, 1989, but has not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention.