Tokyo – Japan will call for U.N. economic sanctions against North Korea if the communist state tests an atomic bomb, a top ruling party official said Sunday after the North claimed it was taking steps to produce more plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Shinzo Abe, secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said Japan faces the greatest threat of any nation if North Korea is armed with nuclear weapons.
“If North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons becomes definite and (the North) conducts nuclear testing, for instance, Japan will naturally bring the issue to the U.N. and call for sanctions against North Korea,” he told Asahi TV. “It is unthinkable not to impose any sanctions in case of a nuclear testing.”
U.S. officials said last week that spy satellites looking at the North’s northeastern Kilju saw the digging of a tunnel and the construction of a reviewing stand – possible indications of an upcoming test.
North Korea also raised the stakes in the dispute last week by claiming it was taking steps that would enable it to harvest more plutonium for nuclear weapons and would bolster its arsenal.
A ministry spokesman said the country removed 8,000 fuel rods from the reactor at its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 50 miles north of Pyongyang. If reprocessed, the rods could, after several months, yield enough plutonium for a couple of nuclear bombs, South Korean media reported.
The North claimed in February to have nuclear weapons, and the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said recently that the country previously had enough plutonium for up to six nuclear bombs.
“We are very concerned about any progress that North Korea makes towards a nuclear weapon,” Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, said in an interview Sunday on CNN.
He said a nuclear test “would be something where the North Koreans would be defying not only us, but our partners in the six-party talks, and action would have to be – have to be taken.”
Pyongyang has withdrawn from six-nation talks that also involved South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the United States, and said it would not return to the talks until the United States dropped its “hostile” policy toward it.
Washington repeatedly has said it has no intention of invading the North.
