North Korea could make two nuclear bombs per year, warns scientist
November 24th, 2010 - 6:37 pm ICT by ANIPyongyang, Nov 24 (ANI): North Korea, which carried out attacks on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong yesterday, could make one or two bombs’ worth of enriched uranium per year once the new enrichment facility starts operating fullflegedly, according to a nuclear analyst.
Hui Zhang of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, made this assessment following the claims by an engineer and two nuclear policy experts from Stanford University in California that they saw an industrial-scale uranium enrichment plant in a visit a few days earlier to North Korea.
Engineer Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and his two colleagues had also said that they were “stunned” to see a major new enrichment facility at the country’s Yongbyon nuclear complex, saying: “We saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than 1000 centrifuges all neatly aligned.”
North Korean officials reportedly told the team that the plant has 2000 centrifuges that are already being used to separate fissile uranium-235 from the more abundant uranium-238.
Based on these claims, Zhang said that if that is true, “North Korea could make 30 to 40 kilograms of highly enriched uranium per year”, enough for one or two nuclear weapons.
The number of centrifuges is appropriate if they are really intended to make fuel for a small, experimental nuclear power plant like the one North Korea is building, New Scientist reported.
According to Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, although North Korea is believed to already possess plutonium-based nuclear weapons, uranium-based weapons can be more efficient, allowing them to produce more powerful explosions.
Both Zhang and Alvarez suspect that North Korea has revealed this new capability in order to influence any future negotiations over its nuclear activities.
“I think the North Koreans are pushing very hard to convince the United States of its nuclear ambitions and where it stands right now as a way of increasing their bargaining leverage,” Alvarez added. (ANI)
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