North Korean state media reported on Friday, September 13, 2024, that leader Kim Jong Un visited an uranium enrichment facility, giving a rare disclosure of the secretive facility’s existence.
The state media disclosed that Kim went around the control room of the uranium enrichment base and a construction site that would expand its capacity for producing nuclear weapons.
The location and exact date of Kim’s visit to the site were not disclosed in the report, but the purpose of his inspection, according to the state media, was to lay out a “long-term plan for increasing the production of weapon-grade nuclear materials.”
Korean Central News Agency reported that during a visit to the Nuclear Weapons Institute and the production base of weapon-grade nuclear materials, Kim expressed “great satisfaction repeatedly over the wonderful technical force of the nuclear power field” held by North Korea.
It added that Kim stressed the need to further augment the number of centrifuges to “exponentially increase the nuclear weapons for self-defense,” a goal he has repeatedly stated in recent years.
It said Kim ordered officials to push forward the introduction of a new-type centrifuge, which has reached its completion stage.
Kim said North Korea needs greater defense and preemptive attack capabilities because “anti-(North Korea) nuclear threats perpetrated by the U.S. imperialists-led vassal forces have become more undisguised and crossed the red-line,” KCNA said.
North Korea first showed a uranium enrichment site in Yongbyon to the outside world in November 2010, when it allowed a visiting delegation of Stanford University scholars led by nuclear physicist, Siegfried Hecker, to tour its centrifuges.
North Korean officials then reportedly told Hecker that 2,000 centrifuges were already installed and running at Yongbyon.
Satellite images in recent years have indicated North Korea was expanding a uranium enrichment plant at its Yongbyon nuclear complex.
Nuclear weapons can be built using either highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and North Korea has facilities to produce both at Yongbyon.
It’s not clear exactly how much weapons-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium has been produced at Yongbyon and where North Korea stores it.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry strongly condemned North Korea’s unveiling of a uranium-enrichment facility and Kim’s vows to boost his country’s nuclear capability.
A ministry statement said that North Korea’s “illegal” pursuit of nuclear weapons in defiance of U.N. bans is a serious threat to international peace.
It noted that North Korea must realize it cannot win anything with its nuclear program.
North Korea’s Nuclear Capability Not An Empty Threat
Yang Uk, a security expert at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, opined, “Overall, the message they are trying to send is that their nuclear capability is not just an empty threat, but that they are continuing to produce (bomb fuel).”
“And who are they speaking to? It could obviously be South Korea but also certainly the United States,” Yang said.
Also, Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that Kim is exceptionally confident these days and he’s particularly interested in making sure that his calls for a massive increase in nuclear capabilities are not misinterpreted.
Panda added, “these disclosures lend credibility to North Korea’s plans and demonstrate that they’ve come a long way in their enrichment capabilities.”
“For analysts outside the country, the released images will provide a valuable source of information for rectifying our assumptions about how much material North Korea may have amassed to date.
“Overall, we should not assume that North Korea will be as constrained as it once was by fissile material limitations. This is especially true for highly enriched uranium, where North Korea is significantly less constrained in its ability to scale up than it is with plutonium.”
Ankit Panda
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