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South Korea's nuclear surpriseAs more and more countries adopt the IAEA's Additional Protocol, all kinds of nuclear secrets will come spilling out. Currently under the microscope: South Korea.
South Korea's surprise reappearance on the list of proliferation-problem states provides important lessons for the future of the global nonproliferation regime. First, the revelations confirm the potency of the IAEA's new environmental monitoring system called for in the agency's Additional Protocol, which forced these stories to surface years after they had been suppressed by South Korea's secretive nuclear establishment. Second, the news revealed yet again how politicized the IAEA's monitoring and evaluation process is, with leadership politics in Vienna reportedly playing a role in the timing and manner in which the stories came to light. Third, it showed that states will eventually pay a price if they allow nuclear research establishments to conduct activities without stringent inculcation of nonproliferation norms and a deep appreciation of the legal and political obligations of parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)-IAEA safeguards system. South Korea's secret and undeclared activities put at risk not only South Korea's security; they also threatened the security of its neighbors and all states with a stake in the global nonproliferation regime. If North Korea was aware of the South's uranium enrichment research activities in the 1990s (and its intelligence capacities in the South should not be underestimated) then the South's activities may have helped motivate the North to acquire enrichment capacities of its own; in 2002, the United States alleged that the North began an enrichment effort in about 1998. Fourth, South Korea's hidden actions exemplify the impulse toward proliferation that arises in response to the discriminatory treatment the United States shows to different states, permitting, for example, Japan to have tons of plutonium while South Korea may have none, and Japan to explore mixed oxide fuels for reactors while South Korea may not. The disparity in the application of ostensibly universal nonproliferation norms is felt keenly by Koreans who remain resentful of Japan's big-power status and its colonial aggression in Korea. So far, South Korea has been lucky. The spillover effect into the North-South Korean relationship appears to be minimal, and the impact on the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program has been contained. This apparently minimal impact on nonproliferation diplomacy across the always-volatile Demilitarized Zone is largely due to the North's foot-dragging in the six-party negotiations in the run-up to the U.S. election. Finally, the revelations about South Korea's nuclear activities remind everyone of the high stakes in Korea. Getting nonproliferation wrong could lead to a proliferation chain reaction involving Japan, Taiwan, and others.
The second time aroundThe news that South Korea admitted in August 2004 that it had enriched uranium and not declared it was trumped in September by the revelation that it had also extracted plutonium in 1982, and had declared neither activity to the IAEA. This retrospective transparency forces a major reevaluation of what governments and analysts around the world thought they knew about South Korea's nuclear history. It not only underscores the well-known fact that South Korea has previously attempted to acquire the means to make nuclear weapons, but also confirms that attempts to develop weapons-related capacities--whatever Seoul's intentions--continued in the nuclear research and development establishment long after they were thought to have ended in response to U.S. pressure. It was commonly known that from 1968 to 1975 South Korea attempted to obtain both a plant to reprocess plutonium from spent fuel and intermediate-range missile delivery systems. [1] After 1971, an organized South Korean effort to develop a bomb was orchestrated by the Weapons Exploitation Committee with presidential-level backing. This early effort to become a nuclear-armed state was partly motivated by President Richard Nixon's unilateral withdrawal of one of the two American infantry divisions then based in South Korea. It took the direct intervention of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the threat to rupture the U.S.-South Korean alliance to terminate South Korea's nuclear weapons program in 1975. This confrontation also resulted in South Korea's accession to the NPT in April 1975 and its signing of a full-scope safeguards agreement in November 1975. Soon after, President Jimmy Carter's ill-fated attempt to withdraw the remaining infantry division and its nuclear weapons stimulated South Korea's military to engage in a flurry of barely disguised threats of proliferation. However, the reversal of Carter's policy in 1978 ended the threats. But South Korean scientists did not in fact abandon their interest in nuclear weapons-related experimentation. Once gained, it is hard to lose technical capacity or the taste for acquiring scientific knowledge, and technologies with weapons applications were now part of the institutional memory of the South Korean nuclear establishment. Moreover, South Korea was rapidly building one of the world's largest nuclear power programs, primarily based on U.S.-licensed light-water reactors but also utilizing Canadian heavy-water reactor technology. Today, the South has 19 power reactors generating 16.7 gigawatts of electricity--one of the biggest nuclear programs in the world. This power program has led the South to develop a substantial and highly competent scientific and technical infrastructure to support many aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. It also enables the South to keep the door to the proliferation path slightly ajar. Most observers assumed that South Korea's massive investment in nuclear power and its membership in the first tier of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development states, combined with the continued extension of U.S. nuclear deterrence, had ended any residual South Korean interest in obtaining nuclear weapons. In fact, South Korean nuclear researchers, especially those affiliated with the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), like their colleagues in Japan, were eager to reprocess plutonium from spent fuel to "close the fuel cycle" on "energy security" grounds, to reduce South Korea's high dependence on imported fossil fuels, and, increasingly, on uranium fuel. [2] As early as 1983-1984, specialists (including one of the authors) were aware that KAERI was conducting chemical experiments related to the handling of spent fuel that crossed the reprocessing boundary. At the time, the United States insisted that the South not reprocess plutonium in any manner in return for U.S. reactor technology and financing for South Korea's nuclear power program. Another indicator of continuing South Korean interest in technology with immediate application to a weapons program surfaced in 1984 when the United States halted a Canadian transfer of mixed oxide fuel-related reprocessing technology to South Korea. And from the mid-1980s on some maverick intellectuals associated with the security (but not the nuclear) establishment in the South argued openly that it should obtain its own nuclear weapons, especially after the South Korean military dictatorship was overthrown in 1987. One even stood for parliament on a "nuclear nationalist" platform. In spite of these contrary indicators, most nonproliferation analysts held that South Korea's gains from being an internationally certified, squeaky-clean nuclear-powered state meant that the South would adhere stringently to all its nuclear safeguards obligations. And it followed that the government would rein in the ambitions of scientists at KAERI and would forgo all nuclear weapons-related research and technological capacity. The nuclear standoff with North Korea beginning in 1991 only reinforced the international perception that the South would play strictly by the rules set by the NPT-IAEA safeguards system. The NPT and the IAEA regimes were also enshrined in both the 1992 inter-Korean "Denuclearization Declaration," in which both Koreas pledged not to acquire plutonium or enrichment facilities, and in various bilateral agreements signed earlier between South Korea and supplier countries, including a 1974 agreement with the United States and a 1979 agreement with Australia for the supply of uranium for reactor fuel. To find that all of these assumptions and expectations were wrong is deeply disturbing; it is important to know what the South Koreans did and when.
The uranium enrichment experimentsSouth Korea has now admitted it conducted two enrichment activities separated by about 20 years. On October 21, 2004, South Korea told the IAEA that it had conducted a chemical enrichment experiment in 1979-1981 that it had not previously declared as required under its safeguards agreement. The experiment aimed to assess whether chemical exchange could be used to produce low-enriched uranium (3 percent uranium 235) for pressurized-water reactor fuel. Using an ion exchange column, scientists enriched 700 grams of natural uranium powder to 0.72 percent uranium 235. South Korean officials say this activity ceased in 1981 and that related equipment was dismantled in 1982. KAERI researchers made no attempt to conceal the activity; they even published a report in 1981 that reviewed the technology and their own experimental results. [3] Yet South Korea did not report the activity to the IAEA. A decade later, South Korea began to apply laser separation technology to uranium. This activity built on elementary laser research undertaken in the 1960s and molecular laser isotope separation technology development in the 1970s and 1980s, obtained with Russian and American technical assistance. In 1990, South Korea began to develop atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) technology involving small, solid-state, high-power lasers that could enrich uranium. KAERI researchers first applied AVLIS to non-fissile materials and later to uranium. [4] In 1990, researchers also began spectroscopic work with uranium. From 1993 to 2000 at least 10 AVLIS-related experiments involving depleted uranium or undeclared natural uranium were conducted. In 1993-1994, KAERI conducted a uranium evaporation test involving imported depleted uranium. This was followed in 1994-1996 by spectroscopic experiments with depleted and natural uranium metal. Finally, in January, February, and May 2000, KAERI conducted AVLIS experiments using domestically produced undeclared uranium metal. The scientists separated one-fifth of a gram of uranium enriched to an average of 10.2 percent uranium 235. The equipment used in these experiments was dismantled and stored at KAERI for future disposal, ostensibly because it was "contaminated"--a rationale we view with skepticism. Some of this dismantled equipment is now used for non-nuclear, stable isotope separation research. The ostensible purpose of the AVLIS activity was to separate gadolinium 157 from other gadolinium isotopes. AVLIS has a variety of industrial and medical applications, but laser separation of isotopes such as gadolinium is not likely ever to be economically justified. Nonetheless, KAERI staff state privately that they believe that the isotopic separation technology might eventually have industrial or commercial applications. The uranium used in these experiments came from a 3.5-kilogram sample of a 154-kilogram stock of uranium metal that KAERI produced in 1982 at its Taejon facility. This stock seems to have come from two separate sources. The first was uranium metal extracted from phosphate fertilizer (about 2.5 metric tons of ammonium uranyl tricarbonate) rather than from refined uranium ore. The Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) announced on September 14, 2004 that a private company, Yong-Nam Chemicals, imported the uranium-bearing phosphate fertilizer and declared to the IAEA that about 100 kilograms of uranium oxide was recovered and that this was the sole source of the uranium used in the AVLIS experiments. South Korea also declared that it obtained another 25 kilograms from uranium ore from a coal mine in Goesan. But 125 kilograms would have been insufficient to produce 150 kilograms of uranium metal. Moreover, the IAEA has found that samples of uranium said to be from the Goesan mine are depleted relative to the amount of uranium 235 expected in natural uranium--yet another anomaly for South Korea to explain. The depleted uranium could only have come from imported uranium from which the uranium 235 had been removed. Reconciling these disparities will be complicated further because two laboratories (and a third that produced depleted uranium) were dismantled in 1994. We believe that KAERI bought about 900 kilograms of natural uranium from Yong-Nam Chemicals; 700 kilograms were fabricated into fresh fuel for the Wolsung 1 CANDU natural uranium reactor, and two KAERI laboratories fabricated 154 kilograms of natural uranium metal from which the 3.5 kilograms were taken. Some 50 kilograms appear to have been lost. KAERI retains 133 kilograms of the natural uranium metal. If 3.5 kilograms were consumed in making the enriched uranium sample, a discrepancy of about 14 kilograms remains. KAERI claims that it was mixed into the depleted uranium metal that was produced at KAERI in the mid-1980s. No doubt the IAEA will investigate this discrepancy. According to Nucleonics Week, in 2002 a U.S. expert proposed to KAERI that it conduct a molecular laser isotope separation (MLIS) experiment for zinc, but the proposal was rejected by Energy on nonproliferation grounds. If accurate, this report means that KAERI scientists remained interested in laser enrichment technologies until recently. [5] KAERI did not report the enrichment experiments to MOST until late June 2004. It seems that KAERI officials thought they could conceal the experiments because the amount of enriched uranium was so small. Responding to our inquiries, KAERI officials and the hands-on researchers admit that they knew they were required to report their activities to MOST--and that MOST would then be required to report them to the IAEA--but they went ahead anyway. MOST, therefore, unknowingly breached South Korea's obligations by not reporting the enrichment experiments to the IAEA within 30 days--yet MOST and KAERI still have not admitted violating the safeguards agreement. However, that agreement clearly required such a report. [6] The issue of violation will be determined by the IAEA when it considers the South Korean report.
Why disclosure now?South Korea signed the Additional Protocol on June 21, 1999, and it entered into force on February 19, 2004. Until then, South Korea's nuclear activities were regulated under the provisions of the NPT and the standard IAEA safeguards arrangements, as well as by bilateral agreements with suppliers. After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the IAEA and most states belonging to the NPT agreed that the standard agreements were too weak and that the IAEA needed more intrusive and uninhibited inspection rights, especially the right to collect environmental samples that would enable forensic radiochemistry to be used to determine what radiochemical activities had been conducted and when. A new approach was enshrined in the IAEA's model Additional Protocol, which the agency adopted in 1999. Once South Korea ratified the Additional Protocol, MOST had 180 days to submit a detailed report to the IAEA with additional information about South Korean nuclear fuel activities and sites. The Additional Protocol enables the IAEA to conduct environmental sampling and to demand access to undeclared locations. It also obligates states to facilitate access to locations other than those they have identified, if the agency has specific information or needs to implement specific technical measures such as environmental monitoring. [7] It appears that KAERI officials had been concerned for years that it would be difficult to keep the uranium and earlier plutonium-related experiments secret once the Additional Protocol came into force. Sampling would inevitably yield traces of undeclared activities, just as occurred at Yongbyon in North Korea more than a decade ago. In November 1997, the IAEA detected two particles of slightly irradiated depleted uranium with plutonium in samples taken from hot cells associated with the TRIGA III research reactor in Seoul. In December 1999, the IAEA asked South Korea about this indicator of undeclared plutonium separation activity, but South Korea did not acknowledge that separation had taken place. On December 10, 2002, the IAEA requested permission to visit KAERI's Laser Technology Center in Taejon, a request repeated on April 1, 2003. Finally, a year later, South Korea told the IAEA that plutonium separation had in fact occurred at the TRIGA III hot cell. Faced with a rising tide of inquiry and evidence, KAERI finally confessed its uranium experiments to MOST in late June 2004. MOST officials reported these (and the earlier depleted uranium and plutonium) activities to the IAEA on August 17, 2004. This was followed by a series of counterproductive South Korean diplomatic efforts to limit the damage to the country's reputation that would follow from the public release of what they hoped would be a confidential disclosure to the IAEA. Reportedly, South Korea first sought to have the United States ensure that agency officials did not report the matter to the IAEA Board of Governors. When this strategy failed, the South Koreans pressured agency officials to the same end in late August and even reportedly threatened to block the reappointment of IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. [8] An IAEA leak about the report of past enrichment activities in response to this campaign forced South Korea to announce its disclosures to the IAEA to an astonished world on September 2, 2004. The IAEA inspection team visited the KAERI site of the uranium activities from August 30 to September 4, 2004, and submitted its report to the IAEA's Board of Governors on November 11. [9]
The depleted uraniumSome of the natural uranium metal produced in 1982 was used eventually for the enrichment experiments, but it appears that some was used also in research activities related to producing depleted uranium metal from 1983 to 1987--another activity that should have been disclosed to the IAEA. Today, KAERI excuses the nondisclosure by arguing that the natural uranium metal was for radiation shielding, and that the original purpose in producing uranium metal was only to acquire fundamental technical and manufacturing competence. [10] There are no legal grounds for not disclosing the activity, however. In reality, KAERI produced several hundred kilograms of depleted uranium metal, using imported depleted uranium from the United States and possibly from domestically supplied uranium. However, the depleted uranium munitions KAERI produced were never deployed by South Korean conventional forces, according to KAERI staff. [11] In 1987, KAERI dismantled all the depleted uranium munitions and related facilities and only then reported this activity to the IAEA. KAERI has not produced uranium metal since 1987. According to our sources, the United States intervened in 1987 to induce KAERI to terminate this activity. On October 21, 2004, MOST stated that before 1987 the activity had been conducted with the concurrence of the U.S. government. It is true that KAERI's secret production of significant amounts of depleted uranium metal had no direct relevance to nuclear weapons capacity and that by definition the depleted uranium munitions could not have been used as nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the activity was not reported to the IAEA in a timely manner.
Plutonium separationIn 1997, and again in October 2003, the IAEA took environmental samples at a former KAERI site in Seoul and found physical evidence of separated plutonium--evidence that could only have resulted from undeclared activities. KAERI permitted the sampling at the site, even though KAERI was not obliged to allow it under the safeguards agreement operative at the time. As a result, the plutonium separation experiment was discussed in a safeguards meeting between the IAEA and MOST on December 9, 2003. It appears that at least the section of the IAEA responsible for these inspections was not aware of South Korea's decades-earlier plutonium research. But based on their sampling, they suspected some past hanky-panky by KAERI. On September 9, 2004, a week after the shock of the enrichment story, an Associated Press story forced the South Korean government to publicly confirm that KAERI had conducted plutonium separation experiments. [12] On July 20, 1981, KAERI transferred a five-pin miniature fuel assembly made at Taejon to the TRIGA III reactor in Seoul, informing the IAEA of the move on July 31, 1981. The assembly, containing 2.5 kilograms of depleted uranium, was then irradiated for 82 days in the reactor core. The mini-assembly was then dismantled and dissolved in a hot cell at the reactor site. In April and May 1982, a small group of KAERI researchers separated tiny amounts (said to be 40 milligrams or less) of plutonium from the solution of plutonium and uranium fission products. On May 31, 1982, South Korea filed a "Physical Inventory Report" with the IAEA that stated incorrectly that the mini-assembly was still in the TRIGA III reactor core. It did not report that the assembly had in fact been used for a plutonium separation experiment. On September 30, 1982, South Korea reported to the IAEA that this irradiated and now dissolved mini-assembly was a measured discard of an unirradiated fuel assembly. In short, South Korea not only failed (and continues to fail) to declare these activities and the design information of the equipment and related facilities involved in the plutonium separation, but it also misled the IAEA. South Korea still must disclose the use to which it put the research results, as required by its safeguards agreement. The United States was tracking these activities closely. Because the chemistry of the destructive spent-fuel processing undertaken by the KAERI group was basically reprocessing, the United States found it contrary to U.S. policy and intervened to bring it to a halt to avoid a violation of the 1978 U.S. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, which forbade U.S. support for reprocessing by non-nuclear weapon states. There is speculation that the IAEA was aware of the activity at about the same time but either chose to ignore it or compartmentalized the information in its own bureaucracy and did not alert the Board of Governors. There was, however, no legal reason under the NPT for South Korea not to pursue the activity provided it was reported to the IAEA. Unfortunately MOST did not report the plutonium separation to the IAEA until August 2004. As to why the United States did not report the activity to the IAEA, it appears that in the 1980s U.S. national intelligence on these matters was shared with the IAEA only on a case-by-case basis, to use the agency to selectively apply pressure on some, but not all, proliferating states. Although KAERI did not report the plutonium separation activity to MOST in 1982, it seems likely that MOST knew about it all along, not least because the separation activity had been well-known in American intelligence circles and to nuclear specialists since the early 1980s. Presumably, a South Korean investigation will cast further light on how the higher levels of government remained ignorant of an activity that was widely known at the time among specialists, both inside and outside intelligence and nuclear circles.
Impacts and outcomesKAERI's uranium enrichment experiment should not be interpreted as a desire by the South Korean government to obtain nuclear weapons material. The experiment was not conducted with specific political or military oversight or direction, nor was it supported by the South Korean government or high-level policy makers. South Korea has complied closely with IAEA safeguards, often in exemplary fashion, with respect to its power reactors and related facility monitoring. North Korea, in contrast, responded to IAEA evidence of undeclared activity by expelling IAEA inspectors in 1994 and eventually withdrawing altogether from the NPT in 2003. The same conclusion can be drawn from the plutonium research of the early 1980s. Many of the KAERI researchers were zealously opposed to nuclear weapons even as they pursued the chimera of a plutonium economy. Nor did South Korea obtain significant quantities of fissile material for a weapons program from either its plutonium separation or uranium enrichment research. However, achieving a 10 percent uranium 235 enrichment level involves 90 percent of the separative work effort needed to reach the 90 percent enrichment level that is highly suitable for nuclear weapons. Indeed, much lower levels of enrichment render uranium bomb-usable, although bombs using lower-enriched material require more uranium and neutron reflectors. [13] Conversely, production of sufficient highly enriched uranium for weapons purposes--tens of kilograms, not fractions of a gram--would have required much more powerful lasers than those at KAERI. No nuclear weapon state has used a laser-based program to support weapons-related enrichment activities on the scale required to make nuclear weapons. Centrifuges are the technology of choice for weapons-related enrichment. Nonetheless, that South Korean scientists not only enriched uranium but kept it secret from their superiors, and engaged in plutonium research earlier, has troubling implications for the future of nonproliferation in the region. Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that the South Korean nuclear establishment is poorly regulated. Japan faced similar quality control problems in 2003 when the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute revealed a 206-kilogram discrepancy between plutonium received and plutonium shipped. Unlike South Korean authorities, Japanese officials promptly reported the discrepancy to the IAEA. [14] Given the mobile nature of nuclear-capable scientists and technicians, tightening up sloppy bureaucratic procedures and loose controls over nuclear researchers, fissile materials, and dual technology trade is likely needed also in China, Russia, and everywhere that nuclear power or weapons establishments have taken root--especially in an era of possible non-state nuclear terrorism. The fact that South Korea's secrecy was sustained even as it was engaged in an attempt to end the North Korean nuclear program, and specifically, the North's alleged uranium enrichment program, leaves the South and its allies, especially the United States, open to accusations of hypocrisy and double standards. It is therefore imperative that Seoul clean out its nuclear house and expose any other secret activities. Finally, the fact that South Korea has not kept to the spirit and letter of the NPT-IAEA safeguards system stirs already troubled waters in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan about the future of their nuclear status. Japan's security culture is already shifting away from its historical commitment to sole reliance on U.S. nuclear deterrence. [15] The notion of a Korean bomb, whether of North or South origin, is one more factor suggesting that the nonproliferation regime is in trouble in East Asia. The proliferation eddies in East Asia involving Taiwan and North Korea already have affected China's vital security interests. China will have all the more reason to work actively with other regional players to reverse these proliferation dynamics. It will take strong and constructive Chinese leadership, preferably in close concert with Japan and Russia, to reverse the trend. South Korea's now-revealed past violations of the IAEA safeguards agreement may result in the agency imposing some form of additional reporting requirements. Yet if all these past activities are fully documented by the IAEA, and if no further transgressions come to light, then South Korea's latest nuclear misadventure could have several positive outcomes. First, this episode should end any notion that South Korea should "close its nuclear fuel cycle" by reprocessing spent fuel, or by gaining an enrichment capacity in a counterproductive quest for energy security. On September 18, 2004, as part of damage control, the South Korean government issued a four-point statement that it had no intention of developing or possessing nuclear weapons, and that it would enhance transparency and continue to expand the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Unfortunately, this language suggests that the Blue House and MOST have not fully internalized the significance of the South's nuclear revelations. In Seoul, "expanding the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes" without specifically abandoning closure of the fuel cycle is code for reasserting South Korea's right to pursue plutonium recycling. The tension between Japan and other states having access to plutonium and enrichment technology while Koreans remain second-class citizens in the nuclear hierarchy might be unsustainable in the long run. Second, the sequence of events suggests that the Additional Protocol's new inspection provisions work. The effectiveness of environmental sampling and forensic radiochemistry forced the enrichment activities of the South Korean scientists to the surface after three long years, in spite of apparent attempts to destroy or hide physical evidence. Governments are still reluctant to fully implement the Additional Protocol, due to its intrusiveness. Indeed, South Korea at first refused to allow visits by the IAEA to KAERI's Laser Technology Center in Taejon as requested in 2002 and 2003. Even after South Korea's Additional Protocol entered into force and the IAEA visited these sites in March 2004, the South Korean government did not allow it to collect environmental samples on the grounds that it had not yet submitted to Article 2a of the protocol. (Reportedly, the IAEA has been allowed to collect uranium samples on subsequent inspection visits.) This experience certainly raises the prospect that others' covert activities might come to light if the Additional Protocol survives opposition by other states. Indeed, only a month after the South Korean activities became public, reports of similar plutonium activities in past decades surfaced in Taiwan, this time in relation to mixed-oxide fuel experiments in plutonium-handling hot cells that apparently still exist but only now will be destroyed. [16] All of these East Asian episodes also reinforce the need for universal commitment by nuclear scientists to abstain from these activities as called for, for example, in the Atomic Energy Society of Japan's code of ethics. [17] Third, South Korea's declaration might offer the North a face-saving way to explain its own enrichment activities as a similarly misguided and mistaken effort by scientists overeager to obtain new technology. This is not to suggest that the South and North Korean activities are symmetrical or equivalent. It is rather to suggest that the situation in the North might be resolved in a similar manner. Arguably, South Korea's declaration is more applicable to the North Korean situation than is the Libyan model of complete nuclear capitulation. Fourth, this episode offers South Korea an opportunity to reassert its non-nuclear commitments in ways that are stabilizing to the region, and which dampen subterranean aspirations in some parts of Japan's leadership for a Japanese nuclear capacity. Japan's media, for example, reported on news of South Korean enrichment and much older plutonium reprocessing with great concern and skepticism. Fifth, if handled correctly, the events may accelerate rather than delay progress at the six-party talks in Beijing over North Korea's nuclear activities and related issues. The fact that North Korea has enough plutonium for a small arsenal of nuclear devices that is no longer safeguarded and might have been weaponized remains the most urgent nuclear proliferation issue in the region. South Korea's surprise detour from the straight and narrow non-nuclear path should not divert attention from this critical issue.
1. Young-Sun Ha, Nuclear Proliferation, World Order and Korea (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 1983); Peter Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg, American Nuclear Dilemmas in Korea (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1991), pp. 199-208. 2. Jungmin Kang and Harold Feiveson, "South Korea's Shifting and Controversial Interest in Spent Fuel Reprocessing," The Nonproliferation Review, Spring 2001, pp. 70-78. 3. One Kaeri report states: "Based on these preliminary experimental results, we plan to develop more effective anion exchange resins and to define the optimum conditions for maximum enrichment effect of U235." KAERI, Development of Ion Exchange Resins for Uranium Isotope Enrichment. KAERI/RR-353/81 (February 1982)(in Korean). Japan and France tried to develop this route to chemical enrichment, but it was abandoned as inefficient relative to cascades by the end of the 1980s. It cannot produce highly enriched uranium. 4. Mark Gorwitz, The South Korean Laser Isotope Separation Experience, NAPSNet Special Report from the Institute for Science and International Security, October 18, 2004. 5. Mark Hibbs, "KAERI Quantum Optics Lab Used Dye Lasers to Separate U-235," Nucleonics Week, September 9, 2004. 6. The International Atomic Energy Agency's INFCIRC/153 (corrected) states at 63: "The Agreement should stipulate that for each material balance area the State shall provide the Agency with the following accounting reports: a. inventory change reports showing changes in the inventory of nuclear material. The reports shall be dispatched as soon as possible and in any event within 30 days after the end of the month in which the inventory changes occurred or were established; and b. material balance reports showing the material balance based on a physical inventory of nuclear material actually present in the material balance area. The reports shall be dispatched as soon as possible and in any event within 30 days after the physical inventory has been taken. The reports shall be based on data available as of the date of reporting and may be corrected at a later date as required." 7. As described by Mohamed ElBaradei, then head of IAEA External Relations, "Statement to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., January 30-31, 1995." 8. Mark Hibbs, "ROK Claimed IAEA Knew of U Work, Pressed for No IAEA Board Report," Nucleonics Week, September 23, 2004, pp. 1, 15-16; Hibbs, "'We Played This Badly,' Koreans Say About IAEA Report Response," Nucleonics Week, September 30, 2004, pp. 7-8. 9. Agence France Presse, "IAEA Cites South Korea for Hidden Nuclear Activities: Report," November 11, 2004. 10. KAERI, Metal Uranium Production and Its Related Processes, KAERI/354/AR-110/80, January 1980 (Korean). 11. Jack Kim, "S. Korean Munitions Violated Nuclear Accord--Group," Reuters, October 21, 2004. 12. Sang-Hun Choe, "South Korea Extracted Plutonium in 1982," Associated Press, September 9, 2004. 13. See Alexander Glaser, "The Conversion of Research Reactors to Low-Enriched Fuel and the Case of the FRM-II," Science and Global Security, vol. 9, pp. 61-79 (2002). 14. Bayan Rahman, "Japan 'Loses' 206 kg of Plutonium," Financial Times, January 29, 2003. 15. Richard Tanter, "With Eyes Wide Shut: Japan, Heisei Militarization and the Bush Doctrine," in Peter Van Ness and Melvin Gurtov, eds., Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific (New York: Routledge, 2004). 16. Chia Yu-Tzu, "Nuke Reports are Mistaken: Officials," Taipei Times, October 15, 2004, p. 1. 17. The Atomic Energy Society of Japan's "Code of Ethics" reads: "Members of AESJ shall not be engaged in any activities associated with research, development, manufacturing, acquisition, and usage of nuclear weapons"; Tatsujiro Suzuki, "Peace Pledge Movement for Scientists in Japan," Pugwash Workshop on Science and Ethics, Paris, September 2003.
Jungmin Kang is an independent nuclear policy analyst in Seoul and an associate of the Nautilus Institute. Peter Hayes is the director of the Nautilus Institute in San Francisco. Li Bin is a professor at the Institute of International Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing. Tatsujiro Suzuki is a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. Richard Tanter is an associate of the Nautilus Institute in Melbourne. Assistance and information was also provided by Frank von Hippel, David von Hippel, George Bunn, Matthew Bunn, and Scott Bruce. January/February 2005 pp. 40-49 (vol. 61, no. 01) © 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Sidebar: South Korea's nuclear nondisclosuresAVLIS enrichment (1991-2000)
Uranium conversion (1982-1994)
Plutonium separation (1981-1982)
Chemical enrichment (1979-1981)
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