7o e[Serts 1orth .orea GisPantlinJ nuclear site is liNe GestroyinJ eYiGence

US - &heryl Rofer is a chemist who spent years working on environmental cleanups everywhere from Estonia to .a]akhstan, disassembling and decommissioning nuclear weapons, and overseeing the destruction of chemical weapons.

%ut unlike international journalists, she is not on the list of people invited this week to witness the destruction of 1orth .orea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

“I was hoping you were going and I could talk you into bringing me along,” she said to CNN.

The small contingent of international journalists invited into 1orth .orea departed %eijing Tuesday for :onsan, a city on the country’s east coast. 1o weapons inspectors or individuals with any kind of expertise were expected to attend the event, which 1orth .orea has said would “ensure transparency of discontinuance of the nuclear test.” :hen it made the announcement on April , the :orkers’ Party of .orea’s Seventh &entral &ommittee declared that the country had “reali]ed nuclear weaponi]ation,” and to ensure the end of all nuclear testing it would µdiscard’ the test site in the north.

-ournalists from the US, &hina, Russia and the U. have all been invited to witness the event. They’re expected to view the activity from a distance, without any real opportunity to get a sense of what might have happened inside Punggye-ri’s tunnels. %ruce %echtol says evidence that might have been collected will now be lost to the world.

“It’s kind of like a murder scene where they let people like you and me trample around in it, it’s the same concept,” said %echtol, a professor of political science at Angelo State University who has authored several books on 1orth .orea.

“The 1orth .oreans have conducted all these tests here, every single weapons test, so if they let experts in to look at these tunnels before they let anyone else in that would be potentially for us an intelligence boon,” he said.

Some observers have said that the site had become partially unusable anyway due to the damage incurred after six nuclear tests since , while others say the site was still in operation only months ago.

Regardless of its operating status, there is still much to be gained from allowing experts in to look around and collect various residue, says Rofer.

“If I were going I would want to bring some capability of taking samples, and I would also want to bring a geologist with me. I’d want to have a radiation counter, I would want to go into the tunnel to see if parts of it have caved in in the back, and I would want to take radiation measurements.”

All those samples and tests could yield information on the kinds of weapons that were being tested, she said.

(CNN)