Thaindian News

Sydney, Aug 2 (IANS) Myanmar is building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facilities with North Korean help, with the aim of acquiring its first nuclear bomb in five years, a media report has said citing evidence from defectors.
The secret complex, much of it in caves tunnelled into a mountain at Naung Laing in northern Myanmar, runs parallel to a civilian reactor being built at another site by Russia that both the Russians and Burmese say will be put under international safeguards, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on its website Saturday.

Two defectors were extensively interviewed separately over the past two years in Thailand by the Australian National University strategic expert Desmond Ball and a Thai-based Irish-Australian journalist, Phil Thornton, who has followed Myanmar for years, the report said.

One was an officer with a secret nuclear battalion in the Myanmarese Army who was sent to Moscow for two years’ training; the other was a former executive of the leading regime business partner, Htoo Trading, who handled nuclear contracts with Russia and North Korea.

Their detailed testimony brings into sharp focus the hints emerging recently from other defector accounts and sightings of North Korean delegations that the Myanmar junta, under growing pressure to democratise, is seeking a deterrent to any foreign “regime change”.

Their story will ring alarm bells across Asia. “The evidence is preliminary and needs to be verified, but this is something that would completely change the regional security status quo,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, the head of Thailand’s Institute of Security and International Studies, Saturday.

“It would move Myanmar from not just being a pariah state, but a rogue state - that is, one that jeopardises the security and well being of its immediate neighbours.”

Washington is increasingly concerned that Myanmar is the main nuclear proliferation threat from North Korea, after Israel destroyed in September 2007 a reactor the North Koreans were apparently building in Syria.

Professor Ball said another Moscow-trained Myanmarese Army defector was picked up by US intelligence agencies early last year. Some weeks later, Myanmar protested to Thailand about overflights by unmanned surveillance drones that were apparently launched across Thai territory by US agencies. These would have yielded low-level photographs and air samples, in addition to satellite imagery.