In a Saturday (local time) article entitled “South Koreans Repeat: We Have No Atom Bomb Program,” the New York Times reported that many analysts are comparing the stir over the uranium enrichment experiment with late President Park Chung-hee’s secret nuclear weapons development attempts.

They say there are many similarities between now and when Park started secretly developing nuclear weapons in the 1970 due to a security gap caused by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s decision to withdraw USFK.

The NYT also mentioned the analysis of Japanese military experts who said the announcement of the uranium enrichment experiment was related to some extent with the decision by the U.S. Bush administration to cut U.S. forces in Korea by a third by next spring.

The paper said, however, that it has yet to be revealed whether there was any connection between the team that conducted this latest experiment and the research team that participated in the secret nuclear weapons development program of the 1970s.

Ahead of this, U.S. media like the Washington Post and the NYT expressed suspicions concerning the South Korean government’s level of involvement, considering the costs of the latest experiment and how it would be extremely difficult to carry it out at the purely civilian level.

In particular, they concentrated on how the incident might provoke the North Korean leadership and complicate the six-party talks over the North Korean nuclear issue.

About this, Chang In-soon, director of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, explained to the NYT that they had enriched a minute amount of uranium “smaller than a sesame seed” purely to “satisfy their curiosity.”

Meanwhile, Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported Saturday that in a phone interview with the news agency, Chang said that under his authority, uranium enrichment experiments took place about three times in 2000. Kyodo added that Chang’s explanation ran counter to the Korean government’s announcement that the experiment took place only once.

Quoting a diplomatic source familiar with the IAEA, Kyodo pointed out that by enriching uranium without reporting it to the IAEA, Korea might have violated its safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. If the IAEA inspection team confirms that such a violation took place, the IAEA board of governors would report it to the U.N. Security Council, the news agency reported.

(englishnews@chosun.com )