North Korea threatens to restore nuclear faciliites

North Korea threatened to reopen a nuclear power plant, process more plutonium for nuclear weapons and withdraw permanently from international disarmament negotiations today, after the UN Security Council condemned its firing of a long-range rocket earlier this month.

The furious reaction came a few hours after the Security Council issued a statement, unanimously agreed by its 15 members. Despite falling short of a formal resolution, which was blocked by North Korea’s former communist allies, Russia and China, the “presidential statement” denounces the rocket launch and calls for a blacklist of North Korean companies, as agreed in a resolution three years ago.

A statement from the country’s Foreign Ministry carried on the state-run Korean Central News Agency, “resolutely condemns” the UN move. “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will strengthen its nuclear deterrent for its defence by all means,” the statement said.

“We have no choice but to further strengthen our nuclear deterrent to cope with additional military threats by hostile forces. We will take steps to restore disabled nuclear facilities... and reprocess used fuel rods that came from experimental nuclear reactors.”

Since last summer, North Korea has suspended activity at its Yongbyon nuclear power plant, where in the past it has extracted plutonium from spent fuel rods believed to have gone into the manufacture of about half a dozen nuclear warheads.

That breakthrough came after protracted discussions at the Six Party Talks, which brought together the US, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea in an effort to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear programme. In today’s statement the North insisted that those talks were over.

“There is no need for the Six-Party Talks any more,” it said. “We will never again take part in such talks and will not be bound by any agreement reached at the talks.”

The strength of the reaction is in keeping with North Korea’s rhetorical style and it does not necessarily mark the end of the negotiations or the full resumption of the nuclear programme. But it indicates that the process of engagement with the North has taken a step back, after slow and painstaking progress in the last two years of the Bush administration.

The Security Council statement said that the committee monitoring sanctions against North Korea must report within ten days on companies, equipment and technologies that should be blacklisted under the 2006 sanctions resolution, which was never enforced. If the committee fails to act, the council itself will come up with a list by April 30.