North may have started its reactor, officials say

While claiming no direct knowledge of what is happening at Yeongbyeon, North Korea's nuclear facility north of Pyeongyang, officials in Seoul acknowledged yesterday that it was possible that the North has begun test operations at the nuclear plant there.

An intelligence official said the United States has satellite images of steam escaping from the reactor, which he said was a sign that it was in operation. He said Washington also has satellite images suggesting that coolant is being loaded into the reactor.

Another Seoul official, who said he was not familiar with the imagery, said the reactor could have been put into operation because the loading of the 8,000 fuel rods necessary for the plant is probably complete. He added, however, that because the plant has been idle since 1994, it is probably not operating at full capacity.

A North Korean spokesman said Wednesday that Pyeongyang "has reactivated the nuclear facility and is normalizing its operation." The brief and characteristically ambiguous mention of a "nuclear facility" in the statement gave no clues to what was really happening there, the Seoul official said.

Pyeongyang reiterated that the plant's operation was intended to generate electrical power, but at 5 megawatt in capacity, the power generated would perhaps not be enough even to supply the energy needed to operate the reactor, let alone the compound and its other facilities.

Officials here also said the United Nations Security Council would probably be asked to address the nuclear issue later this month when the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to declare the North in noncompliance with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. That eventuality was not lost on the North. Pyeongyang's statement late Wednesday included a dramatic shift from its earlier denunciation of Security Council involvement in the matter. "If the council is going to take up this issue," the statement said, "then it should also talk about the responsibility of the United States."

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Pyeongyang also exchanged words yesterday. The North Korean situation is a dangerous and a threatening one, Mr. Rumsfeld told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. He reiterated U.S. readiness to conduct two wars at once, one of them on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea's Rodong Shinmun newspaper warned, "A preemptive strike against our peaceful nuclear facility would lead to all-out war."

by Oh Young-hwan