North Korea will
have enough material for about 20 nuclear bombs by the end of this year,
with ramped-up uranium enrichment facilities and an existing stockpile
of plutonium, according to new assessments by weapons experts.
The
North has evaded a decade of U.N. sanctions to develop the uranium
enrichment process, enabling it to run an effectively self-sufficient
nuclear program that is capable of producing around six nuclear bombs a
year, they said.
The true nuclear
capability of the isolated and secretive state is impossible to verify.
But after Pyongyang conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test
last week and, according to South Korea, was preparing for another, it
appears to have no shortage of material to test with.
North
Korea has an abundance of uranium reserves and has been working
covertly for well over a decade on a project to enrich the material to
weapons-grade level, the experts say.
That
project, believed to have been expanded significantly, is likely the
source of up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of highly enriched uranium a
year, said Siegfried Hecker, a leading expert on the North's nuclear
program.
That quantity is enough
for roughly six nuclear bombs, Hecker, who toured the North's main
Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2010, wrote in a report on the 38 North
website of Johns Hopkins University in Washington published on Monday.
Added
to an estimated 32- to 54 kilogram plutonium stockpile, the North will
have sufficient fissile material for about 20 bombs by the end of 2016,
Hecker said.
North
Korea said its latest test proved it was capable of mounting a nuclear
warhead on a medium-range ballistic missile, but its claims to be able
to miniaturize a nuclear device have never been independently verified.
[nL3N1BL1ND]
Assessments of the
North's plutonium stockpile are generally consistent and believed to be
accurate because experts and governments can estimate plutonium
production levels from telltale signs of reactor operation in satellite
imagery.
South Korean Defence Minister Han Min-koo this year estimated the North's plutonium stockpile at about 40 kilograms.
But
Hecker, a former director of the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory,
where nuclear weapons have been designed, has called North Korea's
uranium enrichment program "their new nuclear wildcard," because Western
experts do not know how advanced it is.
PAKISTAN CONNECTION
Jeffrey Lewis of the
California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies said
North Korea had an unconstrained source of fissile material, both
plutonium from the Yongbyon reactor and highly-enriched uranium from at
least one and probably two sites.
"The
primary constraint on its program is gone," Lewis said. Weapons-grade
plutonium has to be extracted from spent fuel taken out of reactors and
then reprocessed, and therefore would be limited in quantity. A uranium
enrichment program greatly boosts production of material for weapons.
The
known history of the uranium enrichment project dates to 2003, when the
North was confronted by the United States with evidence of a
clandestine program to build a facility to enrich uranium with the help
of Pakistan.
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf
said in his memoirs that A.Q. Khan, the father of that country's nuclear
program, transferred two dozen centrifuges to the North and some
technical expertise around 1999.
"It
was also clear that the suspected Pakistani connection had taken place,
as the centrifuge design resembled Pakistan's P-2 centrifuge," Hecker
said in a report in May.
Hecker
reported being shown around a two-story building in the Yongbyon complex
in November 2010 that a North Korean engineer said contained 2,000
centrifuges and a control room Hecker called "astonishingly modern."
By
2009, the North had likely acquired the technology to be able to expand
the uranium project indigenously, Joshua Pollack, editor of the
U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review, has said.
North
Korea has not explicitly admitted to operating the centrifuges to
produce weapons-enriched uranium, instead claiming they were intended to
generate fuel for a light water reactor it was going to build.
Despite
sanctions, by now North Korea is probably largely self-sufficient in
operating its nuclear program, although it may still struggle to produce
some material and items, Lewis said.
"While we saw this work in Iran, over time countries can adjust to sanctions," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-fuel-idUSKCN11K07Y
