WASHINGTON — North Korean military and industrial officials are “extremely unhappy” with the unprecedented access that U.S. diplomats were given to a missile factory last year, suggesting a split within the North Korean government about a pending deal to abandon its nuclear weapons, according to reports prepared for Congress.
The reports’ authors, Keith Luse, an aide to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Siegfried Hecker, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory director now at Stanford University, spent four days in North Korea last month as talks remained stalled on whether North Korea would give a complete declaration of nuclear programs, as called for in the six-nation deal reached in February 2007.
North Korea maintains that it fully disclosed its nuclear activities last year, but it has slowed its disabling of a nuclear facility because the other parties have fallen behind in providing promised fuel oil. The other countries, led by the United States, blame technical glitches for delivery delays but say North Korea has failed to disclose its interest in uranium enrichment and whether it cooperated with Syria in an alleged nuclear program destroyed by Israeli jets last September.
North Korean ruler Kim Jong-Il is often depicted as an absolute ruler. But the reports to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggest that he must accommodate other powers. Luse reported that the North’s military was resisting efforts by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to complete a deal.
“Chairman Kim’s best efforts to orchestrate a balance among competing interests within the North may be a ‘stretch too far’ for North Korean military hardliners,” Luse wrote. “Discarding the jewel of their arsenal will be difficult.”
North Korea has a plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, which it restarted in 2002 after the collapse of a Clinton-era deal that had frozen it. The Bush administration accused North Korea of cheating by using a clandestine uranium-enrichment program.
In his report, Hecker noted that North Korean officials asserted they had resolved all queries on uranium enrichment, even allowing U.S. experts last year to visit a missile factory and permitting them to take samples.
Government scientists later discovered traces of enriched uranium on the samples.
When Hecker asked to see the factory, he was told that North Korean “military and industrial officials were extremely unhappy. . . . I was told that neither I, nor anyone else, will get access again.”
