* North Korea walks away from Feb 29 agreement with U.S.
* Pyongyang should refrain from nuclear test under UN
resolutions- Washington
* Third nuclear test more likely
By Ju-min Park
SEOUL, April 18 (Reuters) – A bristling North Korea on
Wednesday said it was ready to retaliate in the face of
international condemnation over its failed rocket launch,
increasing the likelihood the hermit state will push ahead with
a third nuclear test.
The North also ditched an agreement to allow back
inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. That
followed a U.S. decision, in response to the rocket launch it
says was a disguised long-range missile test, to break off a
deal earlier this year to provide the impoverished state with
food aid.
Pyongyang called the U.S. move a hostile act and said it was
no longer bound by its Feb. 29 agreement with Washington,
dashing any hopes that new leader Kim Jong-un would soften a
foreign policy that has for years been based on the threat of an
atomic arsenal to leverage concessions out of regional powers.
“We have thus become able to take necessary retaliatory
measures, free from the agreement,” the official KCNA news
agency said, without specifying what actions it might take.
Many analysts expect that with its third test, North Korea
will for the first time try a nuclear device using highly
enriched uranium, something it was long suspected of developing
but which it only publicly admitted to about two years ago.
“If it conducts a nuclear test, it will be uranium rather
than plutonium because North Korea would want to use the test as
a big global advertisement for its newer, bigger nuclear
capabilities,” said Baek Seung-joo of the Seoul-based Korea
Institute for Defense Analysis.
Defence experts say that by successfully enriching uranium,
to make bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima nearly 70 years
ago, the North would be able to significantly build it up stocks
of weapons-grade nuclear material.
It would also allow it more easily to manufacture a nuclear
warhead to mount on a long range missile.
The latest international outcry against Pyongyang followed
last week’s rocket launch, which the United States and others
said was in reality the test of a long range missile with the
potential to reach the U.S. mainland.
North Korea has insisted that the rocket launch, which in a
rare public admission it said failed, was meant to put a
satellite into orbit as part of celebrations to mark the 100th
birthday of President Kim Il-sung, whose family has ruled the
autocratic state since it was founded after World War Two.
The peninsula has been divided ever since with the two
Koreas yet to sign a formal peace treaty to end the 1950-53
Korean War.
SATELLITE IMAGES
Recent satellite images have showed that the North has
pushed ahead with work at a facility where it conducted previous
nuclear tests.
While the nuclear tests have successfully alarmed its
neighbours, including major ally China, they also showcase the
North’s technological skills which helps impress a hardline
military at home and buyers of North Korean weapons, one of its
few viable exports.
The North has long argued that in the face of a hostile
United States, which has military bases in South Korea and
Japan, it needs a nuclear arsenal to defend itself.
“The new young leadership of North Korea has a very stark
choice; they need to take a hard look at their polices, stop the
provocative action,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton said at a news conference in Brazil’s capital.
NEW FACE, SAME TUNE
The Swiss-educated Kim Jong-un, who is in his late 20s,
rose to power after his father’s death last December. The
country’s propaganda machine has since made much of his physical
likeness to his revered grandfather, the first leader and now
North Korea’s “eternal president”.
But hopes that the young Kim could prove to be a reformer
have faded fast. In his first public speech on Sunday, the
chubby leader made clear that he would stick to the pro-military
policies of his father that helped push the country into a
devastating famine in the 1990s.
Kim is surrounded by the same coterie of generals that
advised his father and he oversaw Sunday’s mass military parade.
He urged his people and 1.2 million strong armed forces to
“move forward to final victory” as he lauded his grandfather’s
and father’s achievements in building the country’s military.
Siegfried Hecker, a U.S. nuclear expert who in 2010 saw a
uranium enrichment facility in North Korea, believes the state
has 24-42 kg (53 to 95 pounds) of plutonium, enough for four to
eight bombs.
Production of plutonium at its Yongbyon reprocessing plant
has been halted since 2009 and producing highly enriched uranium
would simultaneously allow Pyongyang to push ahead with its
nuclear power programme and augment its small plutonium stocks
that could be used for weapons, Hecker says.
“I believe North Korean scientists and engineers have been
working to design miniaturised warheads for years, but they will
need to test to demonstrate that the design works: no nuclear
test, no confidence,” Hecker said in a paper last week.
“Unlike the claim that Pyongyang can make that its space
launch is purely for civilian purposes, there is no such
civilian cover for a nuclear test. It is purely for military
reasons.”
(Additional reporting by Choonsik Yoo and Jack Kim; Editing by
Jonathan Thatcher)
