N. Korea flirts with 'red line'

The reported export by North Korea of the uranium material needed to build warheads has escalated the stakes in the Korean nuclear crisis, threatening the six-party talks aimed at persuading North Korea to give up its program.

That view emerges as experts investigate the alleged shipment by North Korea to Pakistan of uranium hexafluoride, the gaseous solution that feeds into the centrifugees that produces enriched uranium, far more powerful than the plutonium-based warheads North Korea now has.

"It's a very serious issue and a clear violation of the 'red line,' " says Cheon Seong Whun, an engineer who specializes in arms control at the Korea Institute of National Unification. While "nobody has set a 'red line' " beyond which North Korea must not go in proliferation, he views the export of any type of nuclear material or technology as violating the general understanding that the North may export missiles but not nuclear material or technology.

The ultimate effect, Mr. Cheon says, "will increase the justification of the United States and other Western countries to take specific action." The diplomatic vehicle would be the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), an effort spearheaded by the US and its Pacific allies to justify interdictions of ships suspected of carrying nuclear technology.

The report from Pakistan "is consistent with what the United States learned more than two years ago when North Korea admitted it had a uranium-enrichment program," says a source close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. But "people hadn't known they had that [much] expertise," that is, the ability to turn raw uranium mined in North Korea into uranium hexaflouride.

It was North Korea's acknowledgment in October 2002, during a visit to Pyongyang by James Kelly, US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, of a program for developing nuclear warheads with highly enriched uranium that triggered the current nuclear standoff. Intelligence analysts are uncertain, though, how close North Korea is to building a uranium-based warhead.

Gary Samore, director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, says the fact that North Korea would sell uranium hexafluoride, known as UF6, "is a very bad sign." It means "they could be willing to sell anything if the price is right."

South Korean analysts, shocked that North Korean scientists know how to produce the compound, predict an inevitable impact on the next round of talks in Beijing. China has hosted two rounds of dialogue, in August last year and again in February, attended by the United States, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas.

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