Donald Greenlees: Norrth Korea's half century quest for nukes
... In 2005, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington released a sheaf of documents from the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Hungarian State Archives that showed that Pyongyang - worried that the United States might use nuclear weapons in the Korean War - was bolstering its defenses against a nuclear attack and trying to acquire its own arsenal from communist allies.
Kim Tae Woo, a nuclear policy specialist at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, said it was also known from Russian intelligence files that Kim Il Sung had asked Moscow for nuclear-topped missiles. "Right after the end of the Korean War, North Korea wanted nuclear bombs," Kim said. "They tried to get them from the U.S.S.R., but the U.S.S.R. refused." So it set about building its own.
A key to that effort was the agreement the North signed with Moscow in March 1956 on joint research in nuclear technology for peaceful uses. At the time, North Korea also became one of 11 states to join the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna, 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, north of Moscow on the Volga River.
In 1956, Pyongyang began sending a new generation of promising scientists and technicians to work and study at Dubna. Many of them now fill key positions in the North's nuclear program.
Aleksei Sissakian, director of the Dubna facility, said about 100 North Koreans had passed through the institute since 1956. About five to eight North Koreans attend each year.
But in a telephone interview and in an e-mail exchange, Sissakian did not attribute any ground-breaking nuclear research to North Koreans in the institute's 50-year history.
One of the notable North Koreans to pass through Dubna was Choi Hak Geun, a physicist who in 1986 became the minister for the atomic energy industry. Yet this might have been a reward for diplomatic work rather than for his contribution to nuclear science.
Choi twice attended the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, in Vienna in the late 1970s, and may have been posted with the North Korea mission to the IAEA, in whose library he found public documents on nuclear energy.
He sent a lot of this material to North Korea, said Lee, author of "The Technocrats Who Run North Korea." A spokesman for the IAEA said it did not regard the technical and scientific documents in its library as sensitive.
The picture of the North's nuclear science that analysts and scientists have built up over many years is one of an effort that is based mainly on imported technology and knowledge. It is an impression reinforced by reports from visiting scientists over the years and by the disclosures about the regime's reliance on Pakistani know-how.
On a visit in 1994 to inspect the Yongbyon complex, where scientists operated a five megawatt reactor from which they were suspected of extracting plutonium, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, met various officials, including a General Li, a military and scientific officer. Li led a tour of the reactor building where the North Koreans had built a smaller version of a 1950s- style British nuclear power plant. He explained that one reason North Korea had built that type of reactor was that all of its important design features had been publicly available in the "Atoms for Peace" program since the 1950s.
Under the Atoms for Peace program that President Dwight Eisenhower began after the armistice ended the war on the Korean Peninsula, information about nuclear technology for power generation was made freely available, despite fears that it would lead to the spread of nuclear weapons.
To South Korean nuclear physicists like Chang In Soon, the former president of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, the North's ability to build a bomb, with or without foreign help, is not a surprise. He said making a nuclear bomb was no longer a great scientific challenge.
"Nuclear weapons were developed 60 years ago," he said. "That is not a high technology. It's a 60-year-old conventional technology. Many, many countries around the world can do it if they try."
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Kim Tae Woo, a nuclear policy specialist at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, said it was also known from Russian intelligence files that Kim Il Sung had asked Moscow for nuclear-topped missiles. "Right after the end of the Korean War, North Korea wanted nuclear bombs," Kim said. "They tried to get them from the U.S.S.R., but the U.S.S.R. refused." So it set about building its own.
A key to that effort was the agreement the North signed with Moscow in March 1956 on joint research in nuclear technology for peaceful uses. At the time, North Korea also became one of 11 states to join the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna, 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, north of Moscow on the Volga River.
In 1956, Pyongyang began sending a new generation of promising scientists and technicians to work and study at Dubna. Many of them now fill key positions in the North's nuclear program.
Aleksei Sissakian, director of the Dubna facility, said about 100 North Koreans had passed through the institute since 1956. About five to eight North Koreans attend each year.
But in a telephone interview and in an e-mail exchange, Sissakian did not attribute any ground-breaking nuclear research to North Koreans in the institute's 50-year history.
One of the notable North Koreans to pass through Dubna was Choi Hak Geun, a physicist who in 1986 became the minister for the atomic energy industry. Yet this might have been a reward for diplomatic work rather than for his contribution to nuclear science.
Choi twice attended the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, in Vienna in the late 1970s, and may have been posted with the North Korea mission to the IAEA, in whose library he found public documents on nuclear energy.
He sent a lot of this material to North Korea, said Lee, author of "The Technocrats Who Run North Korea." A spokesman for the IAEA said it did not regard the technical and scientific documents in its library as sensitive.
The picture of the North's nuclear science that analysts and scientists have built up over many years is one of an effort that is based mainly on imported technology and knowledge. It is an impression reinforced by reports from visiting scientists over the years and by the disclosures about the regime's reliance on Pakistani know-how.
On a visit in 1994 to inspect the Yongbyon complex, where scientists operated a five megawatt reactor from which they were suspected of extracting plutonium, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, met various officials, including a General Li, a military and scientific officer. Li led a tour of the reactor building where the North Koreans had built a smaller version of a 1950s- style British nuclear power plant. He explained that one reason North Korea had built that type of reactor was that all of its important design features had been publicly available in the "Atoms for Peace" program since the 1950s.
Under the Atoms for Peace program that President Dwight Eisenhower began after the armistice ended the war on the Korean Peninsula, information about nuclear technology for power generation was made freely available, despite fears that it would lead to the spread of nuclear weapons.
To South Korean nuclear physicists like Chang In Soon, the former president of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, the North's ability to build a bomb, with or without foreign help, is not a surprise. He said making a nuclear bomb was no longer a great scientific challenge.
"Nuclear weapons were developed 60 years ago," he said. "That is not a high technology. It's a 60-year-old conventional technology. Many, many countries around the world can do it if they try."