North Korea appears to be building a new uranium-enrichment plant in its main nuclear complex, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog warned this week, the strongest sign yet that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, plans to grow its nuclear weapons supply.
Until now, experts and the International Atomic Energy Agency had identified two undeclared uranium-enrichment plants in North Korea. One is in Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear complex, 62 miles north of its capital, Pyongyang. The other plant is in Kangson, just outside Pyongyang.
But in his report to the I.A.E.A.’s board of governors in Vienna on Monday, its director general, Rafael Grossi, said that his agency was “monitoring the construction of a new building at Yongbyon which has dimensions and features similar to the Kangson enrichment plant.”
Mr. Grossi’s statement provided no further details about the new facility. But it marked the strongest indication to date that North Korea is building another uranium-enrichment plant at Mr. Kim’s repeated exhortation to his country to expand its nuclear arsenal.
Western officials and analysts are closely monitoring North Korea’s facilities because its growing nuclear capabilities, as well as its newly forged alliance with Russia, could reinforce Mr. Kim’s leverage should he return to the negotiating table with the United States or South Korea.
North Korea has been producing both types of atomic bomb fuel — plutonium and highly enriched uranium — for years.
It has extracted plutonium from spent fuel from a small Soviet-designed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. On Monday, Mr. Grossi said that North Korean engineers appeared to be reprocessing more spent nuclear fuel in a radiochemical laboratory in Yongbyon to produce more plutonium. North Korea is widely believed to be enriching uranium in Yongbyon and Kangson. Analysts suspect that the country may be operating centrifuges — devices used to enrich uranium — in additional secret locations.
Although North Korea showed a centrifuge plant in Yongbyon to a visiting team of former U.S. officials and academics in 2010, it had kept its uranium-enrichment program under a shroud.
That changed last September when the North’s state media revealed what it called a weapons-grade uranium-manufacturing site for the first time while reporting Mr. Kim’s visit there. Mr. Kim urged engineers there to expand their production of highly enriched uranium to build “exponentially” more nuclear weapons.
The I.A.E.A. later said that the features of the site Mr. Kim visited looked consistent with “the structure of the main building at the Kangson Complex and its newly constructed annex.”
In January, North Korea state media again reported Mr. Kim’s visit to a “nuclear-material production base” and released photos of him inspecting a plant packed with long rows of centrifuges. Mr. Kim called for “over-fulfilling the plan for producing weapons-grade nuclear materials.”
After scrutinizing the photos, some analysts, like Hong Min at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification, said at the time that the plant looked different from the one Mr. Kim visited in September.
A series of resolutions adopted by the United Nations Security Council bans North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. But the country has ignored the ban by producing nuclear bomb fuel and conducting underground tests of six nuclear devices between 2006 and 2017, as well as numerous tests of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. North Korea is also building underwater drones, submarines and warships that it said were capable of launching nuclear weapons.
Disclosing and eliminating North Korea’s uranium-enrichment capabilities have been a key part of international negotiations aimed at denuclearizing North Korea.
The last such talks collapsed in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2019 when Mr. Kim and President Trump could not agree on how fast North Korea should roll back its nuclear weapons program and when Washington should lift sanctions it has in place.
Since his return to the White House, Mr. Trump has expressed interest in resuming negotiations with Mr. Kim. South Korea’s newly elected president, Lee Jae-myung, also called for dialogue with North Korea.
Mr. Kim has expressed no interest in returning to the negotiating table. Instead, he has expanded military cooperation with Russia by sending troops and weapons to aid its war against Ukraine.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated last year that North Korea had built roughly 50 nuclear warheads and had enough fissile material to build about 40 more.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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