"An ISIS report on the North Korean Nuclear Weapons Effort estimates that, prior to signing the 1994 Agreed Framework with the US (and under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its Nuclear Program), the country was operating a reprocessing plant capable of extracting about 60-70 kilograms per year of Weapon-Grade Plutonium from spent gas-graphite fuel generated by its indigenously-built Gas Graphite Reactors. If all three reactors (two at Yongbyon & a third, larger reactor at Taechon) had not frozen their activities they would have been producing around 280 kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium per annum – enough to make 50-60 Nuclear Weapons each year (at a rate of 5 kilograms of Pu-239 per weapon). By 2007 – the year when the Light Water Reactors (LWR) supplied to the country (to replace the Gas Graphite plants frozen under the Framework) are due to start operating – North Korea would have produced between 1,700 and 2,400 kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium, or enough for 350-500 Nuclear Weapons. This would have given the country one of the largest stocks of Weapon-Grade Plutonium and Nuclear Weapons outside of the US & Russia and significantly more than either India or Israel. By 2010, North Korea’s indigenously-built Gas Graphite Reactors would have produced 2,600-3,500 kilograms of Weapon-Usable Plutonium – enough for a mammoth arsenal of between 500-700 Nuclear Weapons. And this from a country no more industrialised than the AU states of South Africa, Algeria or Egypt..."
- XYBØRG
'The Black Bomb'
August 2001 - March 2002
'The Black Bomb'
August 2001 - March 2002
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