UN nuclear inspectors were never given access to North Korean installations where the communist regime claims to have enriched uranium, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday. IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire said the UN atomic watchdog verified nuclear activities at the Yongbyon reactor where plutonium was produced from November 1994 to December 2002, and again from July 2007 to April 2009.
"At that site, agency officials were limited to five facilities that did not include any uranium enrichment activities, and the officials were never provided access to any other sites," Vidricaire said in a statement. Pyongyang for years denied US allegations of a secret enriched uranium bomb-making programme, in addition to the admitted plutonium-based operation which fuelled two nuclear tests.
But on June 13, a day after the UN punished Pyongyang's latest test with tighter sanctions, the North vowed to start an enriched uranium programme and to extract more plutonium from spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor. The regime announced Friday that it had reached the final stage of enriching uranium, a second way of making nuclear bombs.
The hard-line communist state also announced it was building more plutonium-based atomic weapons. Experts believe the North has enough plutonium for possibly six to eight bombs. A full-scale enriched uranium programme is seen as a distant prospect, but troubling because it could be hidden from spy satellites.
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