Photo : YONHAP News
Two U.S. experts who inspected North Korea’s uranium enrichment facility at the Yongbyon nuclear complex in 2010 have analyzed recent images of a similar facility in the North and pointed out differences.
Stanford University professor emeritus Siegfried Hecker and Robert Carlin, a scholar at the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, delivered their assessment in an article they co-wrote for 38 North, a U.S.-based website that monitors North Korea.
In the article, published Wednesday, Hecker and Carlin say the centrifuge hall shown in the photos recently released by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency is not the same one they saw in November 2010.
The two experts stated that “the overall building layout looked nearly identical, but the centrifuges and piping were different.”
The current photos, they continue, show many more small-diameter pipes leading to and from the centrifuges, most likely cooling coils.
They say they believe the North has enough highly enriched uranium for “50 or so tactical nuclear weapons,” but that the true amount could be much more or much less.