TOKYO (AFP) — North Korea has operated a secret uranium-processing plant since 1989 for its nuclear weapons program, a Japanese newspaper said June 9.
The underground Chonma Power Plant, located in northwestern mountain Chonma, has a uranium processing capacity of 1.3 grams (0.05 ounces) a day, the conservative Sankei Shimbun said.
Some 400 people, including 35 engineers, were working at the plant, the daily said, quoting a Chinese report in which a former North Korean military official who fled to China last year had unveiled details of the plant.
Other workers were political prisoners who had been sentenced to life in prison, the North Korean commander in chief at a missile station said in the report.
North Korea has been suspected of secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program, for which it would require uranium.
The underground plant included two processing rooms measuring 3,000 square meters (32,300 square feet) each, along with a room where the workers changed into anti-radiation suit, the report said.
It added that the United States had not detected the Chonma plant although its technical team had inspected Kumchang-ri, 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) southeast of Chonma.
Despite two inspections conducted in Kumchang-ri, Washington failed to notice that forests near the site were polluted by industrial water from the Chonma plant, the newspaper added.
After conducting the second inspection, Washington said late May the suspected nuclear site in Kumchang-ri remained an unfinished empty complex.
A Japanese foreign ministry official said Tokyo had not confirmed the report.
“We have not heard anything about the reported site,” said the official, who declined to be named. “We don’t have a particular plan to discuss the reported site with the United States or South Korea.”
In Hong Kong, a senior U.S. official said June 7 North Korea’s nuclear weapons development program was one of the main threats to the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific region.
“The critical challenge is to eliminate the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs,” said Robert Einhorn, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation.
Under a U.S.-North Korean deal in 1994, an international consortium led by the U.S. pledged to build two lightwater nuclear reactors in the North by 2003 in return for it abandoning attempts to develop nuclear weapons.
North Korea has accused the U.S. of deliberately slowing up the project.
Einhorn said Pyongyang’s test firing of a ballistic missile over Japan in August 1998 heightened tensions in the region and caused “acute international concern.”
This, coupled with the news that Pyongyang had sold its No-Dong medium range missile to Pakistan and Iran, prompted the U.S. to fundamentally review its policy towards the Stalinist state, he said.