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By Elaine Sciolino
North Korea has barred international inspectors from a nuclear reprocessing plant that produces weapons-grade plutonium and intends to restart activity there in a week, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Wednesday.
The decision by the North is a serious setback both for the Bush administration and an international agreement aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons program. It seemed to be a provocative signal to the United States and the other governments involved in the diplomacy that the North would no longer honor a hard-won agreement to dismantle the site in exchange for diplomatic incentives and aid.
The North's latest move comes amid reports that its leader, Kim Jong Il, may be seriously ill, raising concern that hard-liners within the leadership, perhaps the military, may be more directly involved in decision-making.
The North, which tested a nuclear device in 2006 and is believed to have enough plutonium for 6 to 10 bombs, asked the nuclear agency on Monday to remove all seals and surveillance cameras from the reprocessing plant at its Yongbyon nuclear complex. The agency said it finished that process on Wednesday. The North's request had been expected, coming after a dispute with the United States over what North Korea called a delay in removing it from the American list of state sponsors of terrorism.
But the IAEA, as well as the United States and the four other governments involved in delicate diplomacy with North Korea, had hoped that the country would not restart operations at the plant, the most sensitive part of the Yongbyon complex, and that agency inspectors would still have access to it.
Arms control experts say that if the plant is in good repair, it takes minimal time to start the plutonium-making process, and that producing plutonium from spent fuel rods once the process starts could take as little as a few weeks. It would take two to three years, by contrast, for North Korea to produce extractable new plutonium if it decided to restart its nuclear reactor, which is also at the Yongbyon complex.
"There are no more seals and surveillance equipment in place at the reprocessing facility," an IAEA spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming, told reporters at the agency's headquarters in Vienna.
She added that the North Koreans "also informed IAEA inspectors that they plan to introduce nuclear material to the reprocessing plant in one week's time."
"They further stated that from here on, IAEA inspectors will have no further access to the reprocessing plant," she said.
The announcement comes at a time when the Bush administration, in its final months of office, is distracted by the financial crisis, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, unrest in Pakistan and tension with Russia over Georgia.
The administration immediately warned North Korea not to reactivate the plant. "We believe that for the North Koreans to do so, it would only deepen its isolation," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in New York.
She added: "Everyone knows what the path ahead is. The path ahead is for there to be agreement on verification protocol so that we can continue along the path of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. The North Koreans know that, and so we'll continue working with our partners on what steps we might need to take."
Activity at the plant is expected to begin at any time. Before spent fuel rods are put into the reprocessing system, the equipment will have to be tested with non-radioactive liquids to make sure the system is working properly.
As of August, North Korea had about 5,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that could be reprocessed at the plant and another 3,000 still in the nuclear reactor. The plutonium extracted from the rods can be blended with uranium for use in a nuclear reactor or used by itself as an ideal fuel for nuclear weapons.
Although there is no certainty, the IAEA estimates that processing all of them could yield six to eight kilograms of plutonium - more than enough for a bomb.
Arms experts believe North Korea already has a store of more than 30 kilograms of separated plutonium.
The announcement of the North Korean decision was first made by Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's deputy director general and head of the department of safeguards, to a closed-door meeting of the agency's 35-country board of governors, which is meeting in Vienna this week.
North Korea has not told the nuclear agency whether its three permanent inspectors will be allowed to remain at the vast Yongbyon complex or whether they will continue to have access to other buildings there, a European official linked to the agency said.
The inspectors have worked there, living in guest quarters on the site, since July 2007.
Seals and surveillance cameras are still in place at other parts of the Yongbyon site, which include the nuclear reactor, an experimental nuclear power plant and a nuclear fuel fabrication plant.
The United States, Russia, Japan, China and South Korea have been engaged with North Korea in tortured six-country negotiations, which produced an agreement in February 2007 for North Korea to abandon its nuclear activities in exchange for aid and diplomatic incentives.
In July 2007, North Korea told the United States that it had shut down its nuclear reactor at the Yongbyon facility and readmitted an international inspection team. The move completed the first step toward reversing a long confrontation with the United States during which North Korea had made fuel for a small but potent arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The shutdown of the reactor and the return of the inspectors allowed the Bush administration to claim that its strategy of rejecting the North's calls for bilateral talks and insisting on negotiations that included North Korea's neighbors was finally working.
Last November, North Korea began dismantling its nuclear reactor and other plants at the massive complex under the disarmament-for-aid agreement. In June, it blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor on the complex in a dramatic display of how it was committed to the agreement.
The following month, the Bush administration demanded an intrusive verification of the dismantling process before it would grant North Korea one of the concessions under the agreement: removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
That stalled the process, and last month North Korea announced that it had stopped dismantling its facilities to protest the failure of the United States to fulfill a promise to remove it from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. By that time, North Korea had unloaded about 4,700 spent rods from the Yongbyon reactor and were keeping them in a cooling pond.
The decision to halt disabling the complex came on Aug. 14, around the time Kim was said to have suffered a stroke. It remains a mystery whether Kim made that decision, or any of the ensuing moves.
North Korea seemed to harden its position last Friday, saying that it no longer wanted to be removed from the terrorism list. "We can go our own way," a Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying.
But Rice told reporters Wednesday that the six-country talks were not dead.
"By no means," she said. "We've been through ups and downs in this process before. I think the important thing is that this is a six-party process and that means there other states that are carrying the same message to North Korea about their obligations."
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