N. Korean ‘Lab’ Could Make Plutonium, Atom Chief Says

BEIJING — The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday that a building North Korea calls a laboratory could function as a plutonium reprocessing plant, a key component of a nuclear bomb program.

Hans Blix, the IAEA’s director general, also said Pyongyang has produced plutonium at the plant, but not nearly enough for a bomb.

Western intelligence agencies had speculated that the facility was a reprocessing plant that the hard-line Communist state could use to produce enough plutonium to make atomic bombs. North Korea denies it wants to make nuclear weapons.

Blix said that during a five-day tour of North Korean nuclear sites, officials told him the building under construction in Yongbyon was only a research laboratory.

But, he added, “If it were in operation and complete, then it would certainly in our terminology be called a reprocessing plant.”

He made his comments at a news conference in Beijing after he and senior advisers ended their North Korean visit, the first by a delegation from his agency.

CIA chief Robert M. Gates and other intelligence officials have said North Korea could be capable of building nuclear weapons as early as 1993. The nation signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985.