North Korea Caught With Enriched Uranium

It will be interesting to see how the North Korea apologists will respond to this latest finding supporting a covert North Korean highly enriched uranium nuclear program:

U.S. scientists have discovered traces of enriched uranium on smelted aluminum tubing provided by North Korea, apparently contradicting Pyongyang’s denial that it had a clandestine nuclear program, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources.

The United States has long pointed to North Korea’s acquisition of thousands of aluminum tubes as evidence of such a program, saying the tubes could be used as the outer casing for centrifuges needed to spin hot uranium gas into the fuel for nuclear weapons. North Korea has denied that contention and, as part of a declaration on its nuclear programs due by the end of the year, recently provided the United States with a small sample to demonstrate that the tubes were used for conventional purposes. [Glenn Kessler – Washington Post]

The discovery of the high enriched uranium is going to make it very difficult for the State Department to continue to make excuses for Pyongyang all in the name of diplomacy especially with increased Congressional pressure on the State Department to get North Korea to come clean on their nuclear proliferation activities with Syria.Â

However, at least one of the usual North Korea apologists has come out to defend Pyongyang:

David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the equipment did not need to be in the same room but could have picked up the uranium traces from a person who was exposed to both sets of equipment. He said that several Energy Department laboratories have highly sophisticated methods of detecting the nuclear material from items that had been thoroughly decontaminated.

“There is a real art in extracting enriched uranium from samples,” Albright said. The labs can detect micrograms of enriched uranium, which he said is “way beyond what any normal radiation detector would pick up.” However, he said, such minute quantities could easily have come from other sources.

One Free Korea finds Albright’s claims unlikely:

Of course, that assumption — that the enriched uranium traces got onto the tubes in Pakistan, seems unlikely. Presumably, a shadowy axis-of-evil nuclear scientist of above-average intelligence would look for a less suspicious, uranium-trace-free source for its tubes. For obvious reasons, Khan’s own procurement network was decentralized and relied on a global network of suppliers for itself and its clients. The Iranians, for example, were smart enough to get their aluminum tubes through Russian suppliers. So why would any North Korean procurer buy aluminum tubes from the world’s most suspicious source, especially if its purpose was peaceful?

If the fact that North Korea admitted to Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly that they had a covert HEU program and the additional fact that Pakistan nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan confessed to selling HEU technology to North Korea was not enough evidence to convince North Korea apologists of Kim Jong-il’s untrustworthiness; don’t expect this latest finding too either.

Other views on this:
You can read more from One Free Korea here.
Ampontan see similarities with North Korea’s lies with the HEU issue and their lies over kidnapped Japanese citizens.
DPRK Forum sees another Team America moment in all of this.