Stopping Korea’s nukes is only the beginning
Now Nowh he h has struckt k outt at tS Syria,i we should perhaps take more seriously President Trump’s assertion that: ‘If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.’ It raises two important questions. Firstly, how did North Korea acquire the technology to build its atom bomb? There’s evidence that the British Magnox plant design — primarily built as a military plutonium factory — is the blueprint for the North Korean military plutonium programme at Yongbyon. In a Parliamentary reply in May 1994, Douglas (now Lord) Hogg, then a Conservative minister, admitted: ‘we do not know whether North Korea has drawn on plans of British reactors in the production of its own reactors. ‘North Korea possesses a graphite moderated reactor which, while much smaller, has generic similarities to the reactors operated by British Nuclear FuelsF l plc. lH However, designd i information of these British reactors is not classified and has appeared in technical journals.’ The uranium enrichment programmes of both North Korea and Iran also have a UK connection. The blueprints of this type of plant were stolen by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan from the Urenco enrichment plant in The Netherlands in the early Seventies. This plant was — and remains — one-third owned by the UK government. Pakistan sold the technology to Iran who then exchanged it for North Korean Nodong missiles. A technical delegation from the A. Q. Khan Research Labs visited North Korea in summer 1996. The secret enrichment plant is said to be based in caves near Kumch’ang-ni, 100 miles north of the capital, Pyongyang, where U.S. satellite photos show tunnel entrances being built. Hwang Jang- yop, a former aid to President Kim Ilsung (grandfather of the current North Korean President), who defected in 1997, revealed details to western intelligence investigators. As former U.S. State Department senior official Bennett Ramberg has written, even if the U.S. were to destroy North Korea’s nuclear capability, Pyongyang has thousands of conventional missiles, many aimed at South Korea’s infrastructure, including the latter’s 23 nuclear reactors with another under construction at Yeongdeok. Any such attack would inevitably destroy the containment for the spent nuclear fuel storage ponds adjoining each reactor complex, distributing uncontrolled radiation across the densely populated peninsula. Dr DAVID LOWRY, Institute for Resource and Security Studies,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.