North Korea shows first photos of banned uranium enrichment site

SEOUL: North Korea for the first time showed images of the centrifuges that produce fuel for its nuclear bombs on Friday (Sep 13), as leader Kim Jong Un visited a uranium enrichment facility and called for more weapons-grade material to boost the arsenal.
The state media report on Kim’s visit to the Nuclear Weapons Institute and a production base for weapon-grade nuclear materials was accompanied by the first photos of the centrifuges, providing a rare look inside North Korea’s nuclear programme, which is banned under multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions.
The country, which conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, has never publicly disclosed details of its uranium enrichment facility. 
The photos showed Kim walking between long rows of metal centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium – which is needed to produce nuclear warheads. 
The report did not make clear when the visit occurred nor the facility’s location.
Kim urged workers to produce more materials for tactical nuclear weapons, saying the country’s nuclear arsenal is vital for confronting threats from the United States and its allies.
The weapons are needed for “self-defence and the capability for a preemptive attack,” he said.
The North Korean leader said “anti-DPRK nuclear threats” from the “US imperialists-led vassal forces” have crossed the red-line, according to the report.
South Korea’s unification ministry condemned the North’s unveiling of the facility, adding that it will never accept Pyongyang’s possession of nuclear weapons.
North Korea is believed to have several sites for enriching uranium. Analysts say commercial satellite imagery has shown construction in recent years at the main Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, including its uranium enrichment plant, suggesting possible expansion.
The North’s Yongbyon nuclear site was purportedly decommissioned after talks – although Pyongyang later reactivated the facility in 2021.
According to Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, the facility unveiled Friday is “highly likely to be the Kangson site” – another top-secret nuclear complex near Pyongyang.
Uranium is a radioactive element that exists naturally. To make nuclear fuel, raw uranium undergoes processes that result in a material with an increased concentration of the isotope uranium-235.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said on Monday that the UN nuclear watchdog had observed activity consistent with the operation of a reactor and the reported centrifuge enrichment facility at Yongbyon.
Kim stressed the need to increase the number of centrifuges so as to “exponentially increase” the nuclear weapons and expand use of a new type of centrifuge to further strengthen the production of weapon-grade nuclear materials.
The new type of centrifuge shows North Korea is advancing its fuel cycle capabilities, said Ankit Panda of the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Kim also appears to suggest that North Korean tactical nuclear weapons designs may primarily rely on uranium for their cores,” he said.
This is notable because North Korea is more able to scale up its highly enriched uranium stockpiles, Panda said, compared to the more complicated process for plutonium.
North Korea invited some foreign scientists to view a centrifuge facility at Yongbyon in 2010, but Jenny Town of the US-based Stimson Center said Friday’s report is the first and only photographs of the equipment.
“It shows how advanced their enrichment capability has become, which gives greater credibility to both their ability and commitment to increasing their nuclear weapons arsenals,” she said.
North Korea has previously shown photos of what it says were nuclear warheads. It has conducted six underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017.
Estimates of the number of North Korean nuclear weapons varies widely. In July a report by the Federation of American Scientists concluded that the country may have produced enough fissile material to build up to 90 nuclear warheads, but that it has likely assembled closer to 50.
But it is unlikely that the disclosure will be quickly followed by another nuclear test, Hong told AFP.
Pyongyang last month said record rain in late July had killed an unspecified number of people, flooded dwellings and submerged swathes of farmland in its northern regions near China.
ANorth Korean analysis programme run by the Stimson Centre think-tank, 38 North, reported on Wednesday that North Korea’s main nuclear test site had been damaged by floodwaters.
North Korea’s main nuclear test site “is in very bad condition. All roads and railways have been lost due to rain damage, and the ground is very weakened,” Hong added.
Experts said the sudden public disclosure of the North’s uranium enrichment facility could be intended to impact the US presidential election in November.
The images are “a message to the next administration that it will be impossible to denuclearise North Korea”, Hong told AFP.
“It is also a message demanding other countries to acknowledge North Korea as a nuclear state,” he added.
In a statement carried by KCNA, North Korea’s foreign ministry institute spokesperson criticised a recent defence ministerial meeting between member states of the US-led United Nations Command in Seoul, calling it a “war organisation.”
Germany joined the command last month, becoming the 18th nation in a group that helps police the heavily fortified border with North Korea and has committed to defend the South in the event of a war.
Relations between North and South Korea are at one of their lowest points in years, with the North recently announcing the deployment of 250 ballistic missile launchers to its southern border.
The North has also been bombarding the South with trash-carrying balloons, including a five-day straight blitz last week.
On Thursday, Seoul said the North had fired multiple short-range ballistic missiles into waters east of the Korean peninsula.
But KCNA said in a separate dispatch Friday that this had been a test of a “new-type 600mm multiple rocket launcher” which was overseen by Kim.