North Korea's announcement that it will immediately reactivate a nuclear reactor is "a definite sign that the U.S. policy in regard to North Korea is not working," according to a Gettysburg College professor.
"Hopefully, this is a transparent attempt to get the Unted States back to the bargaining table, but the Bush administration does not seem to want to bargain and is distracted by Iraq and the war on terrorism," said Peter Pella, a Gettysburg College physics professor who served on the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA).
The North Korean move is in response to the United States stopping its monthly shipment of heavy oil for North Korean conventional power plants, according to Pella. "The North Koreans claim they need the reactors for electric power for the winter, though there is little in the way of an electrical distribution center near those reactors," he said. The U.S. move was in response to North Korea's announcement that it had a clandestine, probably immature, uranium enrichment program, he said.
North Korea has only one working reactor and two partially completed reactors, said Pella, who received a meritorious honor award from the ACDA for service in achieving the indefinite extension of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons without conditions and without a vote in 1996. All work on plutonium production has been shut down since 1994. The North Koreans have about 30 kilograms of plutonium in exposed fuel rods and may have already reprocessed as much as nine kilograms from that exposed fuel prior to 1994, he said.
"The small research reactor is capable of producing about six kilograms per year, enough for about one weapon," Pella said. "However the two other reactors, were they to be completed and started up, could produce as much as 190 kilograms per year, enough to build weapons and to export. It would take a couple of months to start up the research reactor and at least a year or two to get the others working."
Gettysburg College is a highly selective four-year residential college of liberal arts and sciences. With nearly 2,400 students, it is located on a 200-acre campus adjacent to the Gettysburg National Military Park. The college was founded in 1832.
RSS