North Korea destroys nuclear reactor tower

YONGBYON, North Korea - North Korea destroyed the most visible symbol of its nuclear weapons program Friday, blasting apart the cooling tower at its main atomic reactor in a sign of its commitment to stop making plutonium for atomic bombs.

An explosion at the base of the cylindrical structure sent the tower collapsing into debris and dust that billowed into blue skies at 5:10 p.m. local time as journalists and diplomats looked on, according to footage filmed at the site by international video news agency Associated Press Television News.

The demolition of the 60-foot-tall cooling tower at the North's main reactor complex is a response to U.S. concessions after the North delivered a declaration Thursday of its nuclear programs to be dismantled.

"This is a very important step in the disablement process and I think it puts us in a good position to move into the next phase," said Sung Kim, the U.S. State Department's top expert on the Koreas who attended the demolition.

After the tower's tumble to the ground, Kim shook hands with Ri Yong Ho, director of safeguards at North Korea's Academy of Atomic Energy Research, who was the most senior Pyongyang official present.

"The demolition of the cooling tower is proof that the six-party talks have proceeded a step further," Ri said, referring to the nuclear negotiations.

The tower destruction was not mentioned by the North's media or shown on state TV broadcasts.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said that North Korea had agreed to principles for verifying its declaration.

"The have agreed that every question that we have about their nuclear program — plutonium, uranium, proliferation — is something they have to answer," he said. "That would mean, if there is any place we want to visit, we should be allowed to visit, any person we want to talk to, we should be allowed to."

In the North Korean government's first reaction to the developments this week, North Korea's Foreign Ministry welcomed Washington's decision to take the country off the U.S. trade and sanctions blacklists.

"The U.S. measure should lead to a complete and all-out withdrawal of its hostile policy toward (the North) so that the denuclearization process can proceed smoothly," the ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

The symbolic tower explosion came just 20 months after Pyongyang shocked the world by detonating a nuclear bomb in an underground test to confirm its status as an atomic power. The nuclear blast spurred an about-face in the U.S. hard-line policy against Pyongyang, leading to the North's first steps to scale back its nuclear weapons development since the reactor became operational in 1986.

Last year, the North switched off the reactor at Yongbyon, some 60 miles north of the capital of Pyongyang, and it already has begun disabling the facility under the watch of U.S. experts so that it cannot easily be restarted.

The destruction of the cooling tower, which carries off waste heat to the atmosphere, is another step forward but not the most technically significant, because it is a simple piece of equipment that would be easy to rebuild.

Still, the demolition offers the most photogenic moment yet in the disarmament negotiations that have dragged on for more than five years and suffered repeated deadlocks and delays.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the tower's destruction would mark a step toward disablement, something that has been ongoing for many months to prevent the North from making more plutonium for bombs.

"It is important to get North Korea out of the plutonium business, but that will not be the end of the story," she said in Kyoto, Japan, on the sidelines of a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.

North Korea's nuclear declaration, which was delivered six months later than the country promised and has not yet been released publicly, is said to only give the overall figure for how much plutonium was produced at Yongbyon — but no details of bombs that may have been made.

Experts believe the North has produced up to 110 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium, enough for as many as 10 nuclear bombs.

The declaration was being distributed Friday by China, the chair of the arms talks, to the other countries involved, U.S. envoy Christopher Hill said.

"We'll have to study it very carefully and then we'll have to work on verification," Hill said in Kyoto.

The declaration does not address the North's alleged uranium enrichment program or suspicions of its nuclear proliferation to other countries, such as Syria.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080627/ap_on_re_as/koreas_...EwxzouWXeGcdArCs0NUE

Is this just another episode of smoke and mirrors?

YEAH!
We are all friends now.
If we could just get those Islamic radicals on board, we'd be all set.
Any ideas?

Yessir SMOKE AND MIRRORS

They have a long way to go to be trusted and the U.S. should proceed with caution. We have been down this road before with N. Korea.

I'm just wondering what they were doing in Syria...

I'm 110% for diplomacy, for talking with Iran, North Korea, et al, but this seems to be a little bit...irresponsible? There has been no real verification of progress. Is this just resume padding?

North Korea fesses up

Fri Jun 27, 12:20 AM ET

Dealing with North Korea can be like dealing with an addict. Attempts to wean it off its nuclear weapons, to cajole it to come clean, sometimes make progress. But it typically relapses to being sneaky, to doing deals with unsavory enablers to generate cash and luxuries for its ruling elite.

That's why only two cheers are in order for the latest apparent progress in the painstaking effort to get the paranoid, Stalinist regime to give up its nuclear weapons, materials and secrets.

On Thursday, North Korea handed over a document, six months after it pledged to do so, that supposedly details its past plutonium production. Today, in a dramatic but largely symbolic move, it is scheduled to publicly blow up the cooling tower of its nearly disabled nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

That'll make for good TV, but what it means won't be known for months or years. At best, it will start the kind of disclosures that Libya once made to renounce nuclear weapons. At worst, it's just another bluff.

North Korea has far more to reveal. It will have to give access to nuclear inspectors and make good on promises to disclose all past proliferation — such as suspected help to Syria to build a nuclear site that Israel blew up last September. North Korea is also known to have had dealings with Iran and the nuclear smuggling network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. Information about the Khan network, implicated this month in distributing plans for sophisticated warheads that can fit on missiles, could be very useful.

Despite North Korea's history of reneging on promises, it is better to be engaged with the regime than not. President Bush has belatedly recognized this, abandoning his bullying "axis of evil" rhetoric for methodical diplomacy that has a better chance of succeeding. On Thursday, Bush lifted some trade sanctions and moved to take North Korea off some terrorism blacklists.

That drew fire from hard-line critics. Even so, it's worth exploring whether an economically desperate regime that saw its nuclear program as an export industry will dismantle it in return for financial incentives and international respectability.

Nukoholic North Korea isn't yet on the wagon for good. But the news rates a cautious toast.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20080627/cm_usatoday/n...4QODek.qIQ3l9Xas0NUE

First U.S. ship carrying food to North Korea arrives

A U.S. ship arrived at a North Korean port carrying 38,000 tons of food to be distributed to the millions of people living in hunger, U.N. sources said Sunday.

The delivery is part of a deal signed by U.S., United Nations and North Korean officials and others, giving outsiders -- including the U.N. World Food Program -- greater access to the country.

The deal follows a Friday agreement over North Korean nuclear activities in which the reclusive communist nation handed over a long-awaited nuclear declaration. North Korea later blew up part of its Yongbyon nuclear plant.

The food and nuclear deals are unrelated, U.S. officials said in May.

President Bush responded to Friday's declaration by lifting some sanctions and removing North Korea from the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism.

Under a letter of understanding, North Korea will open more of the country to aid and allow random surveys to determine whether the intended recipients are actually getting the food. Also, the number of foreign personnel working to provide food aid will increase from 10 to 60.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has 500,000 tons of food aid to be distributed. The U.S. ship, at the port of Nampo, carried the first installment of that total.

The State Department announced the deal last month and said the 500,000 tons of aid would be distributed over the next year.

Widespread hunger in North Korea has long been reported.

The World Food Program's Web site says the most recent large-scale survey, conducted by U.N. agencies and the government, "found 37 percent of young children to be chronically malnourished, and one-third of mothers both malnourished and anemic."

Of a population of 23 million, about 5 million people are in severe need of food, according to some estimates.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/29/nk.food/index.html

Boy, this sure didn't take very long. The ship must have been waiting off shore.

The destruction of the reactor tower was just for show. North Korea is still no less a threat.