SEOUL, South Korea — U.S. monitors of North Korea’s nuclear program left the communist nation Friday after the regime ordered them out and vowed to restart its reactor in anger over United Nations criticism of its recent rocket launch.
The four Americans arrived in Beijing on a flight from Pyongyang but declined to speak to reporters. Their departure came a day after U.N. nuclear inspectors left the North. One U.S. official remains in Pyongyang and will leave today, the State Department said.
The pullout of all international inspectors will leave the global community with no on-site means to monitor North Korea’s nuclear facilities, which can yield weapons-grade plutonium if restarted.
North Korea vowed this week to restart its nuclear program and quit six-nation disarmament talks because the U.N. Security Council criticized its April 5 rocket launch as a violation of resolutions barring it from ballistic-missile-related activity.
Pyongyang says the liftoff was a peaceful satellite launch, but other nations think it was a test of its missile technology.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov plans to visit North Korea next week, a duty officer at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow confirmed, saying more information about the trip will be released Monday. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity in line with policy.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said Beijing will work to continue the six-nation disarmament talks and “hopes for the development of and improvement in relations between the United States and North Korea,” according to an interview in Japan’s Nihon Keizai newspaper.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency left North Korea on Thursday after removing all seals and switching off surveillance cameras, the IAEA said.
Later Friday, the North renewed routine accusations that South Korea and the U.S. are plotting an attack.
“When a nuclear war will break out due to the war chariot of the ‘South Korea-U.S. military alliance’ is a matter of time,” the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
