Did North Korea really have a secret enrichment program? Two decades of doubts, centrifuge-making lathes, uranium mills and, finally, the Kangson and Yongbyon enrichment plants.
A North Korean poster from the UCLA Asia Institute. Sig Harrison has a review of intelligence assessments about North Korea’s uranium enrichment program in Foreign Affairs which concludes “those assessments were exaggerated and blurred the important distinction between weapons-grade uranium…
So, Joe DeTrani and Chris Hill admit that the intel on North Korea’s enrichment program is sketchy and all hell breaks loose … (Read the full text of their testimonies). Giacomo, Sanger and Broad, Kessler, and Landay all have stories.…
I’ve kept up an e-mail conversation with Mark Hibbs on-and-off for that past couple of years. So, I was really psyched to meet him in person at this year’s Carnegie Conference. Apparently, I am not the only one. With a…
I was on a panel today at a CNS lunch to discuss Hugh Gusterson’s article in The Nonproliferation Review, entitled Paranoid Potbellied Stalinist Gets Nuclear Weapons: How the U.S. Print Media Cover North Korea. As you might imagine, Hugh is…
Well, well, well. It isn’t just a light water reactor that North Korea is constructing on the decaying Yongbyon site. The North Koreans also showed Sig Hecker a 2,000 centrifuge enrichment facility in what was the empty Fuel Fabrication Plant…
Without further ado, a guest post by R. Scott Kemp, assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, where he directs the Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy. When it comes to North Korea, there are pretty severe limits on…
Update | A video of the panel is now online. Further update | February 13, 2014 | It’s yet another flow-forming machine inside North Korea. Greetings from Seoul, where I’ll soon be speaking at the Asan Institute’s conference on North Korea.…
Apologies for the nonexistent blogging as of late — I wrote a book! (More on that later.) Writing takes an enormous amount of time, which is to say pretty much every second that doesn’t involve chasing two tiny lunatics around…
KANGSON. We have the (probable) location of North Korea’s original enrichment site: Kangson, now called Chollima. This is probably the spot where the DPRK has been enriching uranium since the early 2000’s, which has previously not been openly identified! Jeffrey,…
The Pyongsan Uranium Concentration Plant and its associated mine are North Korea’s only publicly acknowledged source of uranium yellowcake. [1] From this site, uranium yellowcake is reportedly sent either to the Yongbyon nuclear complex for conversion into fuel elements for…
This is a guest post by my colleague Jamie Withorne. Jamie is a Research Assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Her work focuses on emerging technology, North Korea’s sanctions evasion, and North Korea’s nuclear fuel cycle. This…
North Korea is expanding its uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon. We suspect this is related to Kim Jong Un’s announcement that North Korea will “push ahead with the production of super-sized nuclear warheads.” This analysis is the subject of a…
By Jeffrey Lewis and Sam Lair On Monday, June 9, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi reported to the IAEA Board of Governors in Vienna that “the Agency is monitoring the construction of a new building at Yongbyon which has dimensions…
