North Korea hands over nuclear documents
Updated
The United States has described as "an important first step," the handing over of North Korean documents detailing the country's nuclear programme.
Presenter:Sen Lam
Speaker: Peter Hayes director of the Nautilus Institute in San Francisco
HAYES: Well, they will be the first primary materials supplied by the North Koreans as to the operating profile of the reactor since it was fired up in the late '80s early '90s and it will give us a fairly accurate picture, depending on what's provided of course. But if it's a standard sort of operational records it would give us a pretty good idea of how much plutonium was actually produced, instead of a minimum and a maximum range which is what analysts have been using for policy purposes until now.
LAM: So do these documents relate directly to the facility at Yongbyon?
HAYES: Oh absolutely, these are the operating records as I understand it of the operation of the five megawatt electric, so-called in fact 25 to 30 megawatts thermal reactor, and the fuel processing plant at the Yongbyon complex. So from this we should have the records of the operating behaviour of the reactor going back to about 1990, perhaps 1989, and the reprocessing campaigns of which they have been at least three.
LAM: And Professor Hayes, how do we know that these documents are genuine?
HAYES: We don't until they are analysed. On the other hand, there has been substantial amount of data collected by satellites and other technical means as to how this reactor is operated. The IEA also has some data, including environmental sampling of radioactive waste from the site. But ultimately, the only way we really pin down whether these records are accurate is in fact is to take more samples at the site of the nuclear waste and eventually to drill cross sectionally through the graphite reactor core, extract those samples, and then do forensic analysis on the radiation that's present in the graphite and from that you can get within about a 1 per cent accuracy overtime of the neutron flux and thereby of the plutonium production in the reactor that's a well established technique.
LAM: And even if the documents are genuine, how much of this is likely to be new information do you think?
HAYES: Well, I think it will be useful for us to know whether they have two bombs worth of plutonium, one of which has been blown up or 12. From a strategic nuclear perspective, more than one or one or more excuse me is a significant amount, because you can blow up a city with one nuclear weapon. But at the end of the day, what this is really about is actually stopping the production of more plutonium, whatever the base line number is at Yongbyon, because those plants were able to operate until this aspect of the agreement was implemented. It doesn't solve the rest of the problem, which is what enrichment capacity, if any do they have, nor does it stop all the other potential disasters that could arise from the North Korean plant, including the export of nuclear knowledge or nuclear material, however improbable that might be. Those still have to be pinned down. But of those three elements, undoubtedly stopping the production of further plutonium was the most urgent, until we get through the next phases of negotiation and start to actual dismantle and dispose of their actual nuclear weapons.
