N Korea possesses wide range of threats

Seoul - In its escalating conflict with the United States, North Korea possesses a vast array of potential threats which U.S. and South Korean officials fear could soon be employed to ratchet up the tension beyond the current dispute over the reactivation of the mothballed Yongbyon nuclear reactor complex.

"This game can be done in so many ways," said Kim Tae Woo, an arms control expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, a research group affiliated with the South Korean military. "They can threaten to resume test-firing missiles, and then they could follow through with those threats. They could put their military forces on higher alerts. The question is, will the United States offer a big enough quid pro quo to shut down the game? If not, North Korea can prolong it. All the possibilities are out there."

Some 600 to 750 missiles capable of hitting South Korea and Japan with nuclear and conventional weapons lie inside reinforced bunkers and atop launchers that can be driven from one place to another to avoid detection, according to South Korean and U.S. military intelligence.

Rocket launchers capable of pounding South Korea's capital with conventional artillery, as well as chemical and biological weapons, are clustered near the demilitarized zone that has separated the two halves of the Korean peninsula since the end of the Korean War.

About 3,700 tanks are deployed throughout North Korea, according to U.S. and South Korean estimates. About 700 outmoded but effective 1960s-era Soviet-built fighter jets could easily bomb Seoul, and a small but historically confrontational North Korean navy patrols disputed waters west of the peninsula. Not least, North Korea has roughly 1 million uniformed soldiers -- the third-largest standing army in the world. Its reserves swell its total fighting strength to 8 million, according to South Korean estimates.

Finally, at scattered sites throughout the country, North Korea is pursuing a project about which the outside world knows little, though enough to cause alarm: building a facility that could produce enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Disclosures about this project in October prompted the Bush administration to cut off fuel shipments to North Korea, which responded by reactivating the nuclear reactor. The confrontation escalated on Friday when North Korea said it would expel U.N. inspectors and reopen a plant capable of extracting weapons-grade plutonium. The Yongbyon facility had been closed under a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration.

North Korea has not shifted its military forces in any noticeable way since resuming activity at the reactor, according to a senior U.S. military intelligence officer in Seoul who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But defense experts say North Korea has many options if it wants to prolong and deepen the confrontation. It could shift troops, mass armaments near the demilitarized zone or conduct naval exercises. It could threaten to lift a moratorium on missile tests in place since 1999, or merely appear to be preparing for new tests for the benefit of U.S. intelligence satellites. This would generate unease and uncertainty in Seoul, Tokyo and Washington, increasing pressure on the Bush administration to talk.

"North Korea started with the intention of pressing the United States to come to the negotiating table," said Kim Sung Han, an arms control expert at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and National Security, a government-affiliated research group in Seoul. "But the United States has not responded, and now North Korea is upgrading its actions."

If the nuclear card does not succeed in engaging the United States, he added, North Korea might then shift into other areas, such as breaching waters claimed by South Korea or test-firing a missile in the hope of forcing dialogue.

For now, the tension is concentrated at the Yongbyon complex of more than 200 buildings some 55 miles north of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang. At least one month of work is required, perhaps two, before the five-megawatt reactor can be switched back on, according to Shin Sung Taek, a nuclear expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.

Two larger reactors -- a 200-megawatt plant and a 50-megawatt plant -- were frozen in the early stages of construction in 1994 and will not be useable anytime soon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog whose inspectors remained at the plant through Friday.

Once the existing reactor is operational again, fresh fuel rods could be inserted and left to burn for about three months, according to Shin. At that point, they would contain plutonium. After being removed and placed in an adjacent cooling pond -- essentially, a big swimming pool -- the spent fuel rods could be transferred to a nearby reprocessing plant designed to extract weapons-grade plutonium. The pool is already stocked with enough spent fuel rods to build three to six nuclear bombs, Shin said. In 1994, the Clinton administration pressed for a provision in its agreement with North Korea that would have removed this cache to a third country. But North Korea refused, and the Clinton administration signed off on the deal anyway, seeing it as the best chance to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

Extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods is a complicated process that would take several months, Shin said. Inside the reprocessing plant -- a linked series of large buildings -- the rods are chopped into pieces, then broken down with chemicals.

How long that process would take depends on the condition of the reprocessing plant, Shin said, and that is unclear. When it was shut down in 1994, the facility was only partially completed but already operational. North Korea told the IAEA that it had successfully extracted a small quantity of plutonium, though far less than that needed to build a single bomb. An investigation by the IAEA found evidence that North Korea had extracted a lot more. But before the inspectors could determine how much more, North Korea restricted their access.

The CIA estimates that North Korea produced enough plutonium for one or two bombs before the plant was shut down. North Korea is believed to have used the plutonium to manufacture warheads now stored at the Yongbyon complex, the U.S. intelligence official said.

Once North Korea extracts enough plutonium for new weapons, it could fashion warheads in two to three months, Shin said. North Korea has already logged more than 130 successful tests of the high-power explosives that must be built into a bomb to make the plutonium detonate, according to Kim Tae Woo.

Each stage in North Korea's continuing move toward restarting the reactor amounts to an opportunity to intensify the concerns of its neighbors and the United States. "They will keep us guessing," said Han Sung Joo, South Korea's foreign minister during the last outbreak of nuclear brinkmanship eight years ago. "In all probability, it will get worse before it gets better." Negotiations probably cannot take place until "it becomes obvious to everyone there's no alternative to a showdown of some kind," he said.

Some defense experts say North Korea is not merely using its reactor complex as a diplomatic lever, but now genuinely wants to produce plutonium-based weapons to better deter any potential U.S. attacks.

"This whole series of events this last week shows that they are really committed to moving beyond the red line if they are not checked," said Seongwhun Cheon, an arms control expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government-affiliated research group in Seoul. "They're going to go as far as they can go."

The United States and its allies know far less about events at the uranium-enrichment site, and are not even certain of the location. Uranium enrichment requires vast quantities of energy. According to the U.S. military intelligence officer, North Korea appears to have buried much of the infrastructure for the program, including electrical generators, making it difficult to detect the surges of energy that might reveal its location. The United States believes the project cannot render any useable fissile material for a bomb until at least the end of 2004, he said.

North Korea's military capabilities place great emphasis on chemical and biological agents, including deadly sarin gas, anthrax and smallpox, according to South Korean and U.S. defense experts. North Korea holds large-scale chemical warfare exercises each year in the northwestern province of Pyungnam, according to Kim Tae Woo.

"They consider chemical [weapons] as a normal tool in their arsenal," said the U.S. military intelligence officer. He estimated that about one-fourth of North Korea's missiles carry such weapons.

Those facts, combined with leaps in North Korean ballistics technology, make missiles a particularly useful tool for Pyongyang in raising alarm among its neighbors.

According to South Korean and U.S. intelligence, North Korea has 500 to 600 Scud missiles, which were developed in the 1980s and can reach targets 150 and 300 miles away. In 1993, North Korea first tested its No Dong missile, expanding its reach to 800 miles, thus bringing Japan into range.

On Aug. 31, 1998, North Korea test-fired the three-stage Taepo Dong-1 missile, with a range of approximately 1,250 miles, over Japan. The missile's first stage splashed down in the Sea of Japan, and a second stage crossed over Japan's main island of Honshu and landed in the Pacific Ocean.

A third stage, which U.S. intelligence agencies detected only a few weeks later, broke into pieces and traveled 3,450 miles downrange. Another such test would reverberate loudly in Asia and the United States. -- Washington Post

Brudirect.com