hankyoreh

2007.

By Gil Yun-hyung and Kim Kyu-won, staff reporters

The South Korean government is expressing considerable concern about Pyongyang’s announcement that it will refurbish the Yongbyon nuclear facility and bring it back online. “We will be monitoring the situation closely,” a government spokesperson said.

“We regard the latest move by North Korea as extremely regrettable,” said Cho Tae-young, spokesperson for South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Apr. 2. “North Korea must abide by the agreements reached through the six-party talks and maintain denuclearization on the Korean peninsula.”

What kept the comment so low-key is the fact that the North had already conducted its third nuclear test in Feb. 2013 despite the objections of neighboring countries and then announced on Mar. 31 at the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party that it would simultaneously build its economy and along with its nuclear armament. Or in other words, this was just a follow-up measure to policies the North had already announced.

This is borne out in the content of the announcement. North Korea has in fact already been operating the other nuclear facilities at Yongbyon except for the 5mW graphite-moderated reactor. (The cooling tower at this reactor was destroyed on Jun. 27, 2008.) The North revealed that it had completed reprocessing for 8,000 spent fuel rods in Nov. 2009, and it showed US nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker the latest uranium enriching facilities when he visited the country from Nov. 9 to Nov. 13, 2010. The other nuclear facilities at Yongbyon have already been used in North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship.

“The North’s latest action is both a declaration that the existing nuclear agreements are invalid and a bid to secure additional plutonium while cranking up the pressure on the US and South Korea,” said an official at the South Korean Ministry of Defense. “We have no choice but to join with the UN and the international community it represents in putting pressure on North Korea to prevent it from doing so.”

“We are still confirming whether the North is actually taking any action to reactivate the nuclear facility at Yongbyon,” an official at the National Intelligence Service said.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]