North Korea could become 'plutonium supermarket'

news.ft.com By Stephen Fidler in London Published: January 11 2003 4:00 | Last Updated: January 11 2003 4:00

A withdrawal by North Korea from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) would deal a blow to an accord regarded by many as the cornerstone of efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons.

While the Bush administration has expressed its distaste for a number of multilateral treaties, the NPT, which came into force in 1970, is one that it favours.

This is in part because the treaty carves out a special category for the five countries - Britain, China, France, Russia and the US - that had nuclear weapons before January 1 1967.

"North Korean withdrawal from the NPT could be the beginning of the unravelling of the treaty," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. "This is clearly the most serious proliferation threat that we face, much more serious than Iraq."

Mr Cirincione said the North Korean move posed two risks. It suggested a big change in the strategic equation in north-east Asia, raising questions about whether Japan and South Korea would obtain a nuclear deterrent.

Second, the restarting of plutonium production at the Yongbyon reactor could turn North Korea into a plutonium supermarket for others seeking the material.

The NPT is seen as the treaty that set the norm for non-proliferation. One of its strengths is its near universality: Cuba became the 188th party to the treaty on its accession last November.

The treaty has been credited with curbing the number of nuclear states, belying a common forecast in the 1960s that by the turn of the century there could be between 40 and 100 nuclear states. In fact, there are only eight.

The treaty was not the only factor: the development of effective alliances also meant technologically capable countries such as Germany and Japan were able to forgo a deterrent, under the US nuclear umbrella.

Yet arms control specialists insist the treaty was important in establishing a non-proliferation norm. Among countries with nuclear ambitions, South Africa - which admitted to building six nuclear bombs - signed the treaty in 1991, and Brazil and Argentina joined in the 1990s. Three of the four nuclear successor states to the Soviet Union - Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine - also gave up their nuclear arms.

The prohibition in the NPT against the spreading of nuclear materials and technologies also meant that many countries that sought a nuclear deterrent were unable to overcome the main obstacle to nuclear bomb production: the manufacture of the uranium or plutonium needed for its core.

One important weakness of the NPT though has been the existence of three nuclear states that have never acceded to it: Israel, which was joined overtly by India and Pakistan after their nuclear tests in 1998.

If it follows through on its threat to withdraw, something it threatened in 1993, North Korea would bea fourth. Any member can withdraw with 90 days' notice if the "supreme interests of its country" are jeopardised.

North Korea signed the treaty in 1985 under Soviet pressure. A special arrangement for North Korea under the NPT was negotiated in 1994 which deferred for a decade the question of whether North Korea was complying with the treaty.

Rightwing commentators in Washington have already argued that the US should respond to North Korea by encouraging Japan to develop its own nuclear deterrent. This, one argument goes, would encourage China to exert its full influence to stop North Korea developing nuclear weapons.