NORTH KOREA: North Korea said yesterday it had restarted atomic facilities at the centre of its suspected nuclear weapons programme, and was putting them on a normal footing.
"The DPRK (North Korea) is now putting the operation of its nuclear facilities for the production of electricity on a normal footing after their restart," said a Foreign Ministry statement carried on the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The statement came five days after US officials said satellite surveillance had shown North Korea was moving fuel rods around the reactor complex, including possibly some of the 8,000 spent rods experts consider a key step in building bombs.
However, the US officials added that there was no sign that crucial reprocessing of those spent rods had begun.
North Korea's statement did not mention the fuel rods, and repeated its assertion that it had ended the freeze on its nuclear reactor solely in order to produce electricity.
"The DPRK government has already solemnly declared that its nuclear activity would be limited to the peaceful purposes including the production of electricity at the present stage," KCNA quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
North Korea rejected the International Atomic Energy Agency's plans to refer the nuclear issue to the UN Security Council next week because it had already quit the IAEA, the spokesman said.
IAEA chief Mr Mohamed ElBaradei said in Vienna on Monday the UN nuclear watchdog's board of governors would meet on February 12th, and was likely to hand the nuclear crisis over to the UN Security Council.
"The DPRK does not care about whether the UN Security Council discusses the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula or not," the ministry spokesman said.
"But if it wants to handle this issue, it should fairly call into question the responsibility of the US which is chiefly to blame for the outbreak of this issue and for the strained situation."
It said the US had triggered the nuclear crisis, with President Bush last year branding North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil", and with US policy plans calling for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against rogue states.
"If the UN Security Council, responsible for the issue of world peace and security, does not call the US's wrong Korean policy to task, this organisation will turn out to be partial and the DPRK will, accordingly, not recognise it," it said.
The crisis erupted in October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to enriching uranium in violation of a 1994 accord.
Under the accord North Korea had frozen its nuclear programme in exchange for two energy-generating reactors and free fuel.
Since December, North Korea has expelled IAEA inspectors, withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), restarted a mothballed nuclear complex capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium and threatened to resume missile tests.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Japan has said it may deploy two destroyers near North Korea to detect the possible launch of missile .
Kyodo news agency, quoting unspecified government sources, said Tokyo had decided to strengthen its missile-tracking system as it believed the chances were rising that Pyongyang would test-fire ballistic missiles as part of its brinkmanship diplomacy.
The sources said Japan was considering deploying two destroyers equipped with high-tech Aegis missile-detection systems in the Sea of Japan facing the Korean peninsula.
Japan has four 7,250-tonne Aegis destroyers.
The Aegis system is capable of detecting more than 2,000 aircraft or missiles several hundred miles away and then shooting down more than 10 targets simultaneously. - (Reuters).