By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
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WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has concluded that North Korea’s new plant to enrich nuclear fuel uses technology that is “significantly more advanced” than what Iran has struggled over two decades to assemble, according to senior administration and intelligence officials.
In carefully worded public comments in recent days, senior American and South Korean officials have also argued that the new plant could not have been constructed so rapidly unless there was a sophisticated network of other, secret sites — and perhaps a fully operating uranium enrichment plant — elsewhere in the country.
These conclusions strongly suggest that North Korea has evaded layers of economic sanctions and efforts to intercept sea and air shipments, an effort begun in the Bush administration and accelerated after a United Nations Security Council resolution passed last year after the North’s second nuclear test. The intelligence estimates also greatly complicate the task for American diplomats — including a senior delegation of State Department and White House officials who left for China on Tuesday — who have been struggling for weeks to fashion a common plan with Asian allies and China to contain North Korea’s nuclear advances.
North Korea already has the fuel for 6 to 12 nuclear weapons and has conducted two nuclear tests, a capability it developed by harvesting plutonium from a nuclear reactor that was recently shuttered. While the North says the new uranium enrichment plant will produce fuel for reactors that could produce electricity for the impoverished country — the same argument Iran has made for its enrichment efforts — the North does not possess such reactors today. But if the plant is used to produce highly enriched uranium, it could give the country another pathway to increasing its nuclear arsenal.
Some American officials said they were most concerned that the real intent of showing off the new capability last month to a Stanford expert, Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and two of his Stanford colleagues, was to advertise North Korea’s wares to other countries that might want to buy them. Dr. Hecker said he was “stunned” that North Korea had succeeded in building the plant so quickly.
Last Friday, Gary Samore, President Obama’s chief nuclear adviser, said for the first time that “the North Korean program appears to be much more advanced and efficient than the Iranian program, which is running into problems.” Reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, indicate that the Iranians are experimenting with advanced centrifuges, but have not installed them on an industrial scale, despite years of efforts. Those efforts have been slowed by sabotage, according to widespread reports that Mr. Samore all but confirmed.
“The U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to try to make sure that we complicate matters for them,” he said Friday.
After alluding to a secret North Korean effort to help Syria build a nuclear reactor, which was ultimately destroyed by Israel in a 2007 bombing raid, Mr. Samore said that the new North Korean centrifuges could be attractive to other nations. He added that a critical element of American strategy must now be “to ensure that the North Koreans don’t sell to the Middle East.”
But that has been tried before, and the success of efforts to halt shipments has been spotty at best. According to secret State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks, the United States believes that North Korea successfully shipped 19 advanced missiles to Iran five years ago, and that other technology has passed through the Beijing airport on its way to Iran. Russian experts, the cables showed, disagreed with the American conclusion about the missiles.
Yet three weeks after North Korea’s nuclear revelations, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea are unable to agree upon a response. South Korea is reluctant to go to the United Nations Security Council, after China watered down sanctions against the North for its apparent role in the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean warship, which killed 46 sailors.
Several Chinese officials and academics who deal with North Korean issues argued a week ago in Beijing that it would be counterproductive to seek more sanctions or resolutions at the Security Council — efforts that have been tried before, and that have largely failed.
American, South Korean and Chinese officials have acknowledged in recent days that despite their intense focus on the North’s efforts to obtain uranium enrichment technology, they all missed the assembly of the plant at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear complex. The area is under intense scrutiny from American satellites, but the new plant was built inside an old structure — and satellites cannot see through the roof. Intelligence officials have said in the past that they have few spies in North Korea with access to the most sensitive facilities.
When it comes to North Korea, the United States has frequently had to rely on breakthroughs by allied intelligence services. South Korea first notified Washington, a decade ago, that North Korea was buying components for uranium enrichment. The head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, came to Washington in 2007 and dropped photographs of the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria on the coffee table of Stephen J. Hadley, President George W. Bush’s national security adviser.
American officials caution that it is not clear the North Koreans can get the new enrichment plant running: Dr. Hecker was given a quick walk-through of parts of the plant, and could not confirm whether the centrifuges were operating. But what he saw was enough to convince him, and American intelligence experts, that the facility could not have been built that quickly unless a network of centrifuge construction facilities and uranium processing plants existed elsewhere.
“It is likely that North Korea had been pursuing an enrichment capability long before the April 2009 date it now claims,” Glyn Davies, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week. If so, he said, there was a clear likelihood that North Korea “has built other uranium-enrichment-related facilities in its territory.”
