Seoul - North Korea's decision to remove eight thousand spent nuclear fuel rods from international control is the most dangerous move yet in a two-month-old confrontation over nuclear weapons, analysts said on Monday.
"If North Korea decides that it is actually going to use those fuel rods, that decision will create a lot of problems," said professor Yu Suk-Ryul of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security here.
The rods could be used to extract some 25kg of weapons-grade plutonium, enough for at least three nuclear weapons, experts say. They were sealed in 1994 under an accord North Korea signed with the United States to freeze its nuclear weapons programme in return for energy supplies and the construction in North Korea of two advanced light-water reactors by an international consortium.
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The United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that North Korea began removing seals and monitoring cameras on Saturday from its frozen nuclear facilities.
The nuclear situation will shift rapidly into crisis Pyongyang ignored IAEA appeals for restraint and took further action on Sunday to remove seals from a cooling pond containing the irradiated fuel rods at one of its nuclear reactors in Yongbyong.
"We still have some hope that what we have here is a game of brinkmanship," said an international affairs analyst at the Unification Ministry, which handles relations with North Korea.
But the Stalinist regime's decision to tap into the spent fuel can also mean something more sinister, experts warned.
"If North Korea starts work on the spent fuel rods again, the nuclear situation will shift rapidly into crisis," predicted Yu.
The US and North Korea went to the brink of war over Pyongyang's plutonium programme in the early 1990s.
'Bush will wait until after he has dealt one way or another with Iraq' Washington believes Pyongyang derived enough weapons-grade plutonium from the programme for at least one nuclear bomb and that it could speedily produce more by reactivating the programme.
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