North Korea threatens
to nullify nuclear agreement

By Jim Lea
Osan bureau chief

North Korea has threatened to nullify its nuclear agreement with the United States because of Washington’s "deliberate attempts to delay" construction of two light-water nuclear reactors, the state-operated news agency reported Sunday.

Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, quoted the Rodong Shinmun — the North Korean communist party’s official newspaper — as saying the nation has "suffered enormous economic losses" because work on the reactors has not started as promised in the 1994 pact.

Construction of the reactors has been delayed, first by funding problems, then by North Korean missile testing and suspicions that Pyongyang still has a nuclear weapons development program.

The reactors, with a U.S. government-estimated cost of $4.5 billion – although some private estimates go as high as $11 billion – were scheduled to go on line by 2001. Estimates now are for 2007.

The United States’ "unfaithful action deliberately put off building of the light-water reactors," the North Korean newspaper said. That "is an attempt to undermine our capacity to generate self-sufficient nuclear energy and weaken our economic and military potential."

The newspaper said Washington was looking for a chance to oppress North Korea. "Therefore, the U.S. will have to take all the consequences."

In 1994, the United States signed a framework agreement with North Korea, promising to provide the Stalinist state two reactors if Pyongyang stopped its own nuclear program. The U.S. and other international intelligence agencies said they had evidence that the North’s program included weapons development, although Pyongyang has denied that.

The U.S. light-water reactors would produce less plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, than the North’s old graphite-based reactor.