Posted on 01/20/2004 5:45:49 PM PST by HAL9000
WASHINGTON - North Korea allowed a leading U.S. nuclear expert to hold in his hand an apparent sample of plutonium for nuclear weapons during a visit two weeks ago, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The dramatic moment came during a visit to North Korea's main declared nuclear facility at Yongbyon by a private American delegation that included Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a metallurgist by training.
Hecker "said he thought it was plutonium," said one U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity but is privy to the delegation's briefings for the Bush administration after it returned.
Hecker is due to testify Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He spoke in a classified, closed-door session Tuesday.
While North Korea clearly intended the demonstration to underscore its nuclear capabilities, U.S. officials said, it may only deepen the uncertainty surrounding its weapons programs.
They said that without sophisticated equipment, which the delegation didn't have, there was no way to tell whether the apparent plutonium sample was recent or from a small inventory that the CIA thinks North Korea manufactured more than a decade ago, before a 1994 agreement meant to end the country's nuclear development.
North Korea declared last year that it had extracted more plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear-reactor fuel rods, in response to perceived U.S. threats. That would give it enough material for a half-dozen nuclear bombs, in addition to the two it's already believed to have.
The CIA said it hasn't been able to confirm that the reprocessing has been completed.
However, another delegation member, retired U.S. diplomat Charles Pritchard, said last week that the group was shown an empty cooling pond that once had held canisters containing the 8,000 fuel rods. The implication was that the rods had been reprocessed chemically to extract the plutonium.
International inspectors were kicked out of Yongbyon in late 2002 in the midst of an escalating U.S.-North Korean nuclear dispute.
While plutonium, along with uranium, is the basic fuel for nuclear weapons, the substance isn't particularly dangerous if handled with care and not ingested.
"Outside of the body, plutonium presents little danger," according to a Web site run by the Energy Department's Amarillo National Research Center. "The most predominant form of radiation it emits, alpha radiation, is incapable of penetrating a sheet of paper and is easily stopped by human skin with no damage to the person."
Hecker handled the substance, which was heavy and warm to the touch, with gloved hands, the officials said.
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