NORTH KOREA Fuel rods removed from site

Leaders have said they need nuclear weapons to deter the United States.
NEW YORK (AP) -- North Korea has removed 8,000 spent fuel rods from its main nuclear site, providing further evidence the communist nation may have restarted efforts to build atomic bombs, said an American who visited the complex.
Jack Pritchard, a former U.S. State Department official, was part of a five-member delegation that viewed the secretive Yongbyon nuclear site Jan. 8 in the first visit by outsiders since North Korea expelled U.N. inspectors in 2002.
"We discovered that all 8,000 rods had been removed," Pritchard wrote in an op-ed piece published today in The New York Times.
The delegation, which included former Los Alamos Laboratory director Sig Hecker, met with North Korean nuclear scientists, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan and Lt. Gen. Ri Chan Bok, the point man with the American-led U.N. Command in South Korea.
Hecker is scheduled to provide details about the visit to a Senate panel today.
American officials have accused North Korea of running a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 deal requiring Kim Jong Il's government to freeze its atomic facilities. Washington and its allies since have cut off free oil shipments that were part of the accord.
Advantage of delays
Pritchard, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, said last week that North Korean officials told the delegation the regime sees no urgency in ending the impasse over its nuclear programs because delays give the country more time to expand its arsenal.
In December 2002, the North was suspected of having one or two nuclear weapons that were built before the 1994 accord, but it may have quadrupled its arsenal since then, Pritchard wrote.
In the op-ed piece, he accused the Bush administration of relying on faulty intelligence that dismissed North Korean claims it restarted its program at Yongbyon to build a "nuclear deterrent."
"Now there are about 8,000 spent fuel rods missing -- evidence that work on such a deterrent may have begun," he wrote.
North Korea has insisted it needs nuclear weapons as a deterrent against a possible U.S. attack. But it says it will freeze its nuclear programs as a first step in talks if Washington lifts sanctions against the North, resumes oil shipments and removes North Korea from the State Department's list of countries sponsoring terrorism.