South Korea held talks today over North Korea's decision to take control of thousands of spent fuel rods that could be used to make nuclear weapons.
The United States has condemned Pyongyang's decision to remove international surveillance cameras from its frozen nuclear facilities and to unseal the spent fuel rods.
"The 8,000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular concern because they can be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons," a US State Department spokesman said.
South Korea's frustration with the North was evident in a foreign ministry statemement, which urged Pyongyang to restore the seals and disabled monitoring cameras.
"Despite repeated warnings from our government and the international community, North Korea took further actions to unfreeze its nuclear activities, raising regional tension and amplifying international concerns over nuclear proliferation," the statement said.
The United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called for restraint from North Korea after the Stalinist country began removing seals and monitoring cameras Saturday from frozen nuclear facilities.
But North Korea ignored the IAEA's appeals and took further action yesterday to remove seals from a cooling pond containing some 8,000 irradiated fuel rods at one of its nuclear reactors in Yongbyon.
The rods, which could be used to extract enough weapons-grade plutonium for at least three nuclear weapons, were sealed in 1994 under an accord North Korea signed with the United States to suspend its nuclear weapons programme.