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Syria in 2007 received approximately 45 tons of raw uranium from North Korea for use in producing fuel for a secret nuclear reactor, informed military and diplomatic sources told Kyodo News on Saturday (see GSN, Feb. 26).
An Israeli air assault destroyed the undeclared reactor not long after Syria received shipment of the material and the "yellowcake" uranium is thought to have been sent to Iran in summer 2009, a Western diplomatic source said. A Middle East military source, however, says that Damascus might actually have sent the uranium back to North Korea following the Israeli attack.
The incident draws attention to Pyongyang's proliferation of nuclear material and raises the question of whether Iran might enrich the received uranium, according to Kyodo.
Forty-five tons of yellowcake could be converted into 196 to 287 pounds of bomb-grade uranium, according to Institute for Science and International Security President David Albright.
"In any case, 45 tons of yellowcake is enough for several nuclear bombs," he said (Kyodo News/iStockAnalyst.com, Feb. 28).
Meanwhile, an anonymous high-level South Korean official said Saturday that Pyongyang could return this month or next to stalled multilateral talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons work, Agence France-Presse reported.
"We believe North Korea will come back to the six-party talks sooner or later, possibly in March or April, although we cannot predict the exact timing," the official was quoted by the Yonhap News Agency as telling reporters in Washington.
"Our judgment is based on circumstantial evidence surrounding recent contacts between North Korea and China," he said.
On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was "encouraged by signs of progress" on restarting the talks involving China, Japan, Russia, the United States and both Koreas. The negotiations were last held in December 2008 and were followed by the North's second nuclear test last May (Agence France-Presse I/Google News, Feb. 27).
U.S. special envoy to North Korea Stephen Bosworth said he was also hopeful "that in the not distant future but fairly soon we will see a resumption of the talks," AFP reported (Agence France-Presse II/Spacewar.com, Feb. 27).
South Korea's president today renewed his offer of a "grand bargain" that would reward Pyongyang's total irreversible nuclear disarmament with a massive foreign aid package, the Associated Press reported.
The grand bargain seeks to replace the gradual step-by-step process of denuclearization used for the North in the past. Pyongyang has a history of taking small steps toward nuclear disarmament only to reverse course once it has received foreign concessions.
"For genuine reconciliation and cooperation ... South and North Korea must resolve many pending issues through a dialogue," President Lee Myung-bak said in televised remarks (Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press/Google News, March 1).
Elsewhere, relying on information from South Korean military officials, Yonhap reported yesterday that Seoul and Pyongyang had agreed to meet for military discussions this week regarding a jointly owned industrial site in Kaesong, according to AFP (Agence France-Presse III/Spacewar.com, Feb. 28).