The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (The Making of the Nuclear Age) by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes [Rhodes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

“SO I WAS THERE and it was all sunshine,”26 Hans Blix told me with irony. “They took us to Yongbyon, they took us to see a two-hundred-megawatt nuclear power plant under construction, they took us to a place where they were milling uranium in a mine. But they didn’t want to take us into the laboratory at Yongbyon. They called it a ‘radiochemical’ laboratory. I said, ‘Now, you’ve been opening everything so well, and you must realize that if you say no to this, then I have to report it.’ So eventually they took us to the lab. It had glove boxes”—for handling radioactive materials—“but they were not linked together in a line, and they had only installed about half of the equipment. Even so, we were suspicious that it might be a reprocessing plant.” For a laboratory supposedly making radiochemicals, which are typically used in small quantities for medical and industrial diagnostics, the building was impossibly large, six hundred feet long and six stories high. Blix asked his attendants about the purpose of their “radiochemical” laboratory. “They said they wanted to have breeder reactors in the future so they were learning to reprocess spent fuel. I found what they said very odd. I thought, if they had said that they wanted to reduce the volume of waste, then, yes, reprocessing would have been plausible, but a breeder reactor was not very plausible.” Even the French, with years of experience designing and operating nuclear reactors, had trouble during this period developing advanced breeder reactor technology; for a country such as North Korea, at the outset of its nuclear-power development, to advance directly to building breeders was unlikely in the extreme.

The North Koreans told Blix that they had separated about a hundred grams of plutonium, some three ounces, as a scientific experiment, and they gave him a sample—in powder form in a single-walled glass vial, not the safest way to transport powdered plutonium.* The plutonium, they said, came from several damaged fuel rods they had removed from the five-megawatt reactor in 1990. The IAEA director reserved his judgment of that claim pending detailed tests.

More significantly, in light of what followed, North Korean officials sought Blix’s help in acquiring light-water reactors to ease their country’s energy shortage—the same request they had made previously of the Soviets. They offered to abandon fuel reprocessing in exchange. Since light-water reactors require enriched uranium, which the North lacked the facilities to produce and would have to buy internationally, it was essentially offering to give up its indigenous nuclear program. That offer ought to have rung bells in Washington and elsewhere, but the George H. W. Bush administration’s mind-set on North Korea was baleful. A “senior Defense Department official27 deeply involved in monitoring the North Korean effort” crowed to The New York Times’s David Sanger, who broke the story, “They are moving toward an admission that they have had a bomb project underway, but they are trying to save face. It tells you that the pressure is working.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.