North Korea on Friday revealed a weapons-grade uranium-manufacturing site for the first time, as its leader, Kim Jong-un, flaunted his expanding nuclear weapons program ahead of the United States presidential election in November.
Mr. Kim recently visited a centrifuge plant — until now, a highly guarded component of the country’s nuclear weapons program — and urged his engineers to expand their production of highly enriched uranium to build “exponentially” more nuclear weapons, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported on Friday.
The news agency carried photos of Mr. Kim inspecting what looked like a modern plant packed with long rows of centrifuges, devices used to enrich uranium. The images will be pored over by foreign governments for intelligence at a time when tensions are rising with South Korea and when the Biden administration has pivoted the United States’ nuclear strategy to focus on possible coordinated threats from China, Russia and North Korea.
Although North Korea in 2010 showed a centrifuge plant to a visiting team of former U.S. officials and academics, including a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Siegfried Hecker, the report and photos published in state media on Friday were the first time that the country has unveiled such a facility to the wider world.
A series of resolutions adopted by the United Nations Security Council ban North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. But the country has ignored them by producing nuclear bomb fuel and conducting underground tests of six nuclear devices and tests of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads.
After his 2010 visit to Yongbyon, Dr. Hecker said that the uranium-enrichment facility there appeared to contain about 2,000 gas centrifuges. But North Korea is widely believed to operate other centrifuge plants in other, secret locations. Experts suspect that Kangson, just outside Pyongyang, is one such location. In June, Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the Kangson complex shared characteristics with the centrifuge enrichment facility at Yongbyon.
North Korea on Friday did not reveal the location of the plant Mr. Kim visited or its production capacity.
But Mr. Kim “stressed the need to further augment the number of centrifuges in order to exponentially increase the nuclear weapons for self-defense,” state media reported on Friday. Mr. Kim also said his country was introducing “a new-type centrifuge” that would help expand its weapons-grade nuclear materials.
The so-called North Korean nuclear crisis began in the early 1990s when the United States began accusing the country of producing plutonium from the spent fuel from a small Soviet-designed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. It was later revealed that the country was securing another type of fuel for atomic bombs: highly enriched uranium.
North Korea conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. In June, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that North Korea had built roughly 50 nuclear warheads and had enough fissile material to build about 40 more.
The country’s nuclear force is especially dependent on missiles as delivery vehicles because it lacks advanced warplanes or submarines from which to launch them. Under Mr. Kim, North Korea has diversified its arsenal of missiles, testing various short- and long-range ones, as well as expanding its production of bomb fuel. North Korea launched several short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on Thursday in its first missile tests in more than two months.
In recent months, Mr. Kim has emphasized the production of additional short-range ballistic missiles. North Korea has supplied Russia with some of these missiles for use in the war in Ukraine, researchers have said.
North Korea has also asserted that many of its short-range ballistic missiles were capable of carrying nuclear warheads. In August, it said it was deploying 250 launchers of such nuclear missiles near the border with South Korea. On Friday, North Korean state media quoted Mr. Kim as saying that his country needed more nuclear materials to make more such short-range “tactical nuclear weapons.”
Mr. Kim’s visit to the uranium-enrichment factory came as the campaign for the November presidential election in the United States heats up, in which North Korea has become one of the foreign policy issues under discussion.
“It’s nice to get along when somebody has a lot of nuclear weapons,” the former president Donald J. Trump said of Mr. Kim when he accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in July. “I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.”
During a presidential debate on Tuesday, his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, criticized Mr. Trump for his personal rapport with Kim.
“It is well known he exchanged love letters with Kim Jong-un,” she said. Addressing Mr. Trump, she added, “And it is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”
On Friday, the South Korean government said it strongly condemned North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, including its short-range tactical nuclear weapons. It said it would deal with the North Korean nuclear threat by strengthening the alliance with the United States. In the past couple of years, the allies have begin preparing joint plans to counter a possible nuclear attack from the North.
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