SEOUL: North Korea ordered UN inspectors to leave yesterday after saying it would quit international nuclear disarmament talks and restart a plant that makes bomb-grade plutonium, the United Nations said.
The UN Security Council on Monday unanimously condemned North Korea’s rocket launch on April 5 as contravening a UN ban and demanded enforcement of existing sanctions.
North Korea said in a statement the UN action and separate six-country nuclear talks were an infringement of its sovereignty and it “will never participate in the (nuclear) talks any longer nor ... be bound to any agreement.”
The statement, carried by the official KCNA news agency, said North Korea would “bolster its nuclear deterrent for self-defense in every way.”
The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said North Korea had ordered UN inspectors to leave the reclusive communist country.
“(North Korea) today informed IAEA inspectors in the Yongbyon facility that it is immediately ceasing all cooperation,” IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire said in a statement issued in Vienna.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: “North Korea will not find acceptance by the international community unless it verifiably abandons its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
Experts said the impoverished and energy-starved North lacked the technology to make an advanced light-water reactor. Financial markets in Seoul and Tokyo were not affected by North Korea’s announcement, with investors seeing it as more of the saber-rattling they have come to expect from Pyongyang.
North Korea began taking apart its Yongbyon nuclear plant more than a year ago as a part of a disarmament-for-aid deal it reached with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The UN response to a launch widely seen as a disguised test of a long-range missile will have little immediate impact on the North’s faltering economy, analysts said.
