Home >> East Asia >> North & South Korea  Email  Print How To Dismantle North Korea's Bomb Lisa Schwer - 10/14/2007 North Korea has openly agreed to ‘abandon’ its nuclear program by the end of this year. This declaration was made less than a year after it had carried out the controversial nuclear tests that shook the world. Is it a sincere effort toward peace or just empty words of desperate diplomacy?
In February this year, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has announced that it would shut down all its nuclear enrichment sites and the main reactor, agreeing to abandon its nuclear ambition for once and all. The reward for this long-awaited promise is one million tons of energy aid.
Reports confirm that five facilities have already been successfully shut down since the declaration, including the sole working reactor at Yongbyon.
The efforts witnessed so far seem to give signs of sincere diplomatic efforts, or at least a temporary relief to Chief US negotiator Christopher Hill and the Chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. They say that they appreciate North Korea’s new transparency, even though nothing can be certain until the actual abandonment of fissile material and explosive devices takes place. The pressing question is whether this ‘actual abandonment’ is a feasible project for North Korea.
So, how difficult is it really, to dismantle nuclear weapons? Conceptually, it is very simple. It is all about disassembling the fissionable material and explosives inside the weapons, which are put together in a precise geometric arrangement. In practice, however, it is a tricky procedure: The components have to be separated very carefully, without allowing any conventional explosives to detonate during disassembly, as this would spread the mildly radioactive fissile material around. The fission fuel contained is either Uranium 235 or more commonly Plutonium 239 which is vital to building the weapons, and are the most difficult to dispose of. In the case of Uranium 235, one needs to mix the isotope with normal Uranium 238, performing the exact reverse of the enrichment procedure. The resulting product can be used for nuclear reactor fuels. Plutonium can also be recycled for reactor fuels, however, this is highly risky, as Plutonium can be easily extracted from a stolen shipment of the fuel and be used to re-build weapons.
The dismantling work must be done under shielding, controlled conditions, which means that advanced security precautions have to be undertaken by a team of fully trained and equipped professionals.
The cost of dismantling weapons is estimated at around $1.5 million per weapon, and security costs for safeguarding the devices and materials would be even higher.
North Korea, already spending over 30% of its GDP (around $40 billion) solely on its military, would have to expand the budget further if it wanted to realize the dismantlement. Such an action would further increase poverty within the country. Therefore the credibility of its promise to dispose of all their nuclear weapons is not sufficiently high at the moment. The reactors have been shut down indeed, yet in the present conditions they can still be switched back on again if required.
Were the allegedly important closures in the past few months a true mark of cooperativeness, or only a superficial act performed for the sake of international aid?
In fact, North Korea’s method of changing its stance toward nuclear proliferation as a means to receive aid is nothing new. In 1994, North Korea’s announcement of withdrawal from the Non Proliferation Treaty and its refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on Plutonium inspection were so unnerving that the US attempted all diplomatic measures until North Korea finally agreed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for material aid. Yet the program was never terminated as promised.
No one can tell whether this year has been another case of 1994, but what can be said for now is that it is still too soon to breathe a sigh of relief.
REFERENCES
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6903894.stm
http://www.cfr.org/publication/10858/north_koreas_capitalist_experiment.html
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/7/15/160627.shtml
http://www.atomicarchive.com/weblog/labels/North%20Korea.shtml Lisa Schwer is working on a Master's Degree in War Studies from King's College - London.
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