nuclear-news

The future of a key North Korean nuclear facility is on the table as leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump prepare to meet in Vietnam next week.

The Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, the heart of the North’s nuclear development and research, is Kim’s biggest carrot as he tries to win security guarantees and free his country from the U.S.-backed trade sanctions that are hobbling its economy.

The North Korean leader has suggested he’s ready to talk about closing the facility, capping the amount of fissile material it produces or possibly allowing international inspections. Trump, meanwhile, says he is going into the summit in no hurry to push the North to denuclearize, as long as Kim isn’t conducting nuclear or missile tests.

But time may be of the essence.

As talks drag on, North Korea is believed to have produced enough weapons-grade nuclear fuel to make an estimated half a dozen or so more bombs in 2018 alone.

Here’s the latest on what’s going on at Yongbyon and why it’s so important:

HEDGED BETS

The North has taken steps to disable or dismantle some nuclear and missile facilities since the first Trump-Kim summit last June in Singapore but it has also been hedging its bets.

Using open-source satellite imagery of the Yongbyon complex, a team of experts led by Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has visited the Yongbyon facility several times, estimate the North made enough weapons-grade material to boost its stockpile from an estimated 30 nuclear weapons at the end of 2017 to 35-37 by the end of last year.

“North Korea unsurprisingly continued to operate and, in some cases, expand the nuclear weapons complex infrastructure,” they wrote in a report published this month by the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.

The authors note that Kim isn’t violating any agreements with Trump or shocking any military strategists by building up the North’s stockpile — that’s to be expected in an arms negotiation process. But the stepped up activity underscores how important it is for Washington to push for a deal on Yongbyon……..https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article226619924.html