Photo of a tanker leaving South Korea on Thursday, carrying 6200 tons of oil to the North.
After four and a half years of operation, North Korea is expected to begin shutting down its main nuclear facilities this week. The United Nations have verified that North Korea has shut down its nuclear reactor already. The director general of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei said the shutdown of five facilities in Yongbyon, North Korea should not be difficult, and should be completed within approximately a month.
This shutdown would halt North Korea’s only declared program for producing fuel that can be used in nuclear weapons. Experts say these five facilities can yield more than thirteen pounds of plutonium a year, enough for one atomic bomb.
North Korea agreed to shutdown its Yongbyon facilities in an agreement with the United States, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan. The agreement called for shipping 50,000 tons of fuel oil to North Korea. The North now says it is ready to permanently disable the reactor if the US lifts economic sanctions and strikes the North from a list of terrorism sponsors.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said progress on disarmament would depend on the measures the US and Japan would take to rescind their hostile policies toward North Korea.
After the freeze of the facilities, however, many questions remain. These include whether North Korea will provide the agency with a complete inventory of its nuclear materials, how much plutonium it has produced thus far, and whether it may return to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The North withdrew from the Treaty in 2003 after Washington accused it of running a secret uranium enrichment program in violation of a disarmament deal and stopped oil deliveries.
For more information, please see:
–http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHC5gM6whvMU&refer=home
–http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSSP1037320070716
–http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/asia/13korea.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
–http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=3380339
