SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Wednesday barred South Korean workers from entering a jointly run factory park just over the heavily armed border in the North, officials in Seoul said, a day after Pyongyang announced it would restart its long-shuttered plutonium reactor and increase production of nuclear weapons material.
The move to bar South Koreans from entering the Kaesong factory park, the last remaining symbol of detente between the rivals, comes amid increasing hostility from Pyongyang, which has threatened to stage nuclear and missile strikes on Seoul and Washington and has said that the armistice ending the 1950s Korean War is void.
North Korea said Tuesday that it would put all its nuclear facilities — including its operational uranium-enrichment program and its reactors mothballed or under construction — to use in expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal, sharply raising the stakes in the standoff with the United States and its allies.
In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry warned North Korea to halt its recent spate of “unacceptable” rhetoric and actions that Kerry called “provocative, dangerous and reckless.” Kerry also vowed that the United States would defend itself and its allies South Korea and Japan from North Korean threats.
“We have heard an extraordinary amount of unacceptable rhetoric from the North Korean government in the last few days,” Kerry told reporters at a joint news conference with visiting South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se.
“The United States will do what is necessary to defend us and ourselves and our allies,” Kerry said.
North Korea’s decision will affect the role of its uranium-enrichment plant in the main nuclear complex in Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, a spokesman for the nuclear department told the Korean Central News Agency. It was the first time North Korea said it would use the plant to make nuclear weapons. Since first unveiling it to a visiting U.S. scholar in 2010, North Korea had insisted that it was running the plant to make reactor fuel to generate electricity, although Washington suggested that its purpose was to make bombs.
Saying “work will be put into practice without delay,” the spokesman also said North Korea would refurbish and restart its mothballed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. The five-megawatt graphite-moderated reactor had been the main source of plutonium bomb fuel for North Korea until it was shut down under a short-lived nuclear disarmament deal with the United States in 2007.
In Beijing, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Hong Lei, said China, the North’s main ally, felt “regretful” about the North’s announcement.
The North’s new party line removed any lingering “ambiguity” over what North Korea might try to do with its nuclear weapons, said a senior South Korean government official.
“We now know their real intention,” he said.
