North Korea on Friday revealed a weapons-grade uranium-manufacturing site for the first time, as its leader, Kim Jong-un, flaunted his expanding nuclear weapons program ahead of the United States presidential election in November.
Mr. Kim recently visited a centrifuge plant — until now, a highly guarded component of the country’s nuclear weapons program — and urged his engineers to expand their production of highly enriched uranium to build “exponentially” more nuclear weapons, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported on Friday.
The news agency carried photos of Mr. Kim inspecting what looked like a modern plant packed with long rows of centrifuges, devices used to enrich uranium. The images will be pored over by foreign governments for intelligence at a time when tensions are rising with South Korea and when the Biden administration has pivoted the United States’ nuclear strategy to focus on possible coordinated threats from China, Russia and North Korea.
Although North Korea in 2010 showed a centrifuge plant to a visiting team of former U.S. officials and academics, including a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Siegfried Hecker, the report and photos published in state media on Friday were the first time that the country has unveiled such a facility to the wider world.
A series of resolutions adopted by the United Nations Security Council ban North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. But the country has ignored them by producing nuclear bomb fuel and conducting underground tests of six nuclear devices and tests of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads.
After his 2010 visit to Yongbyon, Dr. Hecker said that the uranium-enrichment facility there appeared to contain about 2,000 gas centrifuges. But North Korea is widely believed to operate other centrifuge plants in other, secret locations. Experts suspect that Kangson, just outside Pyongyang, is one such location. In June, Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the Kangson complex shared characteristics with the centrifuge enrichment facility at Yongbyon.