The North Korean response may depend in part on the conclusions in a review of policy toward the North that the new administration in Washington is expected to complete next month. The negotiations, which began Wednesday and were to conclude Friday, assumed special importance after the North accused the United States of failing to live up to its obligation under the 1994 agreement for completing the reactors by 2003. American and South Korean analysts say they believe that the North's position is part of an elaborate cover-up to disguise its success in extracting the plutonium needed for nuclear warheads and possibly in building the weapons system for delivering a warhead to a target thousands of miles away. Other South Korean analysts said they believed that the North produced 7 to 40 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium in the six years from 1985, when North Korea signed the nonproliferation treaty, and 1991 with the arrival of the first atomic energy agency inspection team. If the North Korean holdings are at the upper limit of the estimates, the North could have enough plutonium for five nuclear bombs on the assumption that eight kilograms is enough for a warhead.
Experts acknowledge, however, that such calculations are speculative.
They have never shown us the data. Satellite photographs showed the building had been two stories, and dump trucks seemed to have deposited a large amount of dirt and gravel around it to cover up the original ground floor. The North Koreans refused, however, to let inspectors dig through the floor to see what lay below. A thorough inspection, covered in the Geneva agreement as a condition for providing the guts of the twin reactors, would go far beyond the cursory looks to which agency inspectors are now limited. The inspectors also are able to look next door to the laboratory at a 5-megawatt atomic reactor that the agency believes irradiated the fuel rods from which the plutonium would have been extracted.