North Korea Vows To 'Weaponize' Plutonium, Start Enriching Uranium

Declaring that it would meet sanctions with "retaliation," the government of Kim Jong Il vowed to "weaponize" all the plutonium it could extract from used fuel rods at its partially disabled Yongbyon nuclear plant.

It also pledged to start enriching uranium to make more nuclear weapons. For the past seven years, North Korea has adamantly denied U.S. intelligence reports that it even had a uranium-enrichment program.

"It makes no difference to North Korea whether its nuclear status is recognized or not," the government said in a statement by its official news agency. "It has become an absolutely impossible option for North Korea to even think about giving up its nuclear weapons."

The 15-member Security Council unanimously passed a resolution Friday that imposes broad financial, trade and military sanctions on North Korea, while also calling on states, for the first time, to seize banned weapons and technology from the North that are found aboard ships on the high seas.

North Korea seemed Saturday to have interpreted the seizure resolution as a "blockade." But at the insistence of China and Russia, the North's traditional allies, the resolution does not authorize the use of military action to enforce any seizure that a North Korean vessel might resist, nor does it restrict shipments of food or other nonmilitary goods.

"An attempted blockade of any kind by the United States and its followers will be regarded as an act of war and met with a decisive military response," North Korea said.

The bellicose language in Saturday's statement -- which describes the Security Council action as "another ugly product of American-led international pressure" -- is similar in tone to previous North Korean responses to U.N. sanctions.

But the North's announcement that it would process enriched uranium to make more weapons was an extraordinary public admission of active involvement in a program whose existence has been denied by Pyongyang since 2002, when it was first mentioned in a U.S. intelligence report.

The Bush administration accused North Korea in 2002 of secretly continuing with nuclear weapons development in violation of a 1994 agreement. It then canceled construction of two light-water reactors in the North that were to have been used to produce electricity for the impoverished country.

Uranium enrichment, which offers a different route for making nuclear weapons than plutonium, uses centrifuges to spin hot uranium gas into weapons-grade fuel.

Insisting that it had no uranium-enrichment program, the North Korean government took an American diplomat to a missile factory in 2007, where there were aluminum tubes that some experts had said could be used in uranium enrichment. North Korea allowed the diplomat to take home some samples.

Traces of enriched uranium were unexpectedly discovered on those samples. Other traces were also found on the pages of reactor records that North Korea turned over to the United States in 2008, as part of now-aborted negotiations on denuclearizing the North.

In recent years, U.S. officials have suggested that while North Korea has tried to enrich uranium, it has not been very successful.

North Korea on Saturday said it has indeed made progress.

"Enough success has been made in developing uranium enrichment technology to provide nuclear fuel to allow the experimental procedure," the government said. "The process of uranium enrichment will be commenced."

This may have been bluster, at least in the short term.

It will take many years for North Korea to develop the uranium route to a bomb, according to Siegfried S. Hecker, a periodic visitor to North Korea's nuclear complex in Yongbyon who is a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and current co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Writing last month in Foreign Policy magazine, Hecker said that Pyongyang lacks uranium centrifuge materials, technology and know-how.

He warned, however, that Iran has mastered this technology and that it could help the North move forward with uranium enrichment. North Korea and Iran have shared long-range missile technology that may provide both countries with the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead.

North Korea also said Saturday that the spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor are being reprocessed, with all the resulting plutonium to be used in nuclear weapons. The government said Saturday it has reprocessed more than a third of them.

Hecker said in a recent interview that there is enough plutonium in the spent rods for "one or two more" nuclear tests. He also said it would take the North about six months to restart its Yongbyon plant, and that it could then produce enough plutonium to make about one nuclear bomb a year for the next decade.

Early this year, North Korean officials said that technicians have used all the plutonium previously manufactured at Yongbyon to make nuclear weapons. Hecker said that was probably enough for between 6 and 8 bombs.

In South Korea on Saturday, several analysts said North Korea's fist-shaking response to Security Council sanctions suggests that hard-liners in the country's military are exercising increasing power in running the government.

Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke last summer and has appeared thin and frail in public appearances. He is believed to have chosen his youngest son, Jong Un, as his future successor.

It is unknown, however, how far the succession process has progressed inside the secretive communist state.

"Given Kim's ailing health, which is complicated by the problem of smooth power transfer to his son, the North Korean leader is likely to have yielded to the demands and pressure of military people who have little awareness of the outside world," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.