Ominous fallout from South Korea
The disclosure that South Korean scientists in a government-linked research institute experimented in enriching uranium inevitably raised speculation that Seoul may have done some clandestine work on a nuclear weapons programme - just in case. The suspicions intensified yesterday when South Korea added that it carried out a separate experiment in the early 1980s using plutonium, and that the International Atomic Energy Agency was investigating both tests.
The admission of enrichment and plutonium research comes at a sensitive time. China is trying to convene the next round of talks, probably later this month, to persuade North Korea to end its activities to develop what Pyongyang calls a 'nuclear deterrent'.
Other governments involved in the six-party talks, including the United States, Japan and Russia, fear that North Korea may use the South's admission to justify its own nuclear weapons programme. A North Korean official said on Wednesday that the South's uranium enrichment programme was 'dangerous' and could fuel a nuclear arms race in Northeast Asia. In North Korea's first response to the South's admission, the official accused the US of applying double standards to the two Koreas.
The South Korean experiment reportedly took place in January and February 2000, nearly two years before the US confronted North Korea, in October 2002, with evidence that it was running a secret uranium-enrichment programme, as well as using plutonium reprocessed from spent nuclear fuel to make weapons. The North denied the charges, but withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and ended inspections of its plutonium production facilities by the IAEA.
The IAEA said South Korea informed it on August 23 that nuclear materials had been enriched without the government's knowledge. After the South agreed to tighter reporting and inspections by the agency in February, Chang In-soon, president of the government-affiliated Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, said he had sent a report in June to Seoul about the experiments. It then informed the IAEA.
All the work at Mr Chang's institute is supposed to focus on civilian nuclear uses, including nuclear power generation. He said the enrichment test had been conducted 'out of curiosity' by scientists using laser isotope separation equipment to extract gadolinium, a cooling material used in nuclear power plants. Mr Chang said that only 0.2 grams had been collected. For weapons use, scientists say that at least 10kg is needed for one bomb.
However, the incident points to the inherent difficulty of controlling the nuclear fuel cycle to ensure that a programme ostensibly for civilian purposes does not phase into a military scheme.
Iran, for example, says it has a right to enrich uranium for energy generation. But the IAEA board will meet again in Vienna next week to decide what to do about claims from the US and others that Iran is using the cloak of a 'peaceful' programme to hide military aims. The fact that it has very large oil and gas reserves and does not need a nuclear power industry feeds those suspicions
But some people in energy-poor South Korea point out that it spends US$375 million each year to import enriched uranium and should no longer be bound by international agreements that prevent it from enriching uranium for nuclear power.
The experiments are a reminder that many non-nuclear states have the know-how, technology and industrial infrastructure to develop nuclear weapons quite quickly, if they feel threatened and vulnerable to attack.
Michael Richardson, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The views expressed in this article are those of the author
