North Korea touts nuclear prowess as China urges talks

North Korea yesterday boasted of running “thousands” of nuclear centrifuges, a week after launching a deadly artillery attack on South Korea, as China pressed for six-nation crisis talks.

State media in the North, which has already tested two atomic bombs made from plutonium, said “many thousands of centrifuges” are operating to enrich uranium at a new plant which it claims is for peaceful energy purposes.

The country first disclosed the new plant to US experts less than two weeks before its artillery assault, which killed two civilians and two marines on South Korea’s Yeonpyeong island near the disputed Yellow Sea border.

Experts and senior US officials fear the plant could easily be configured to make weapons-grade uranium.

Analysts say the nuclear revelation and artillery attack appeared coordinated to pressure Washington and Seoul into resuming dialogue and aid, and possibly to bolster the credentials of leader-in- waiting Kim Jong-Un.

For a third day, the US and South Korean navies staged war games far south of the border involving 11 ships, air power and 7,300 personnel.

South Korea is separately strengthening artillery and troop numbers on frontline islands near the tense frontier. It will hold more drills next week close to the border, though not near Yeonpyeong, the Yonhap news agency said.

China’s refusal publicly to condemn its ally for the shelling – the first of a civilian area in the South since the 1950-53 war – has stirred anger in South Korea.

And its call for talks to end the crisis has so far received a dismissive response from the United States and its Japanese and South Korean allies.

Almost 100 South Korean marine veterans landed on Yeonpyeong island yesterday, vowing to defend it, ferret out spies – and feed abandoned dogs.

“Execute Kim Jong-Il, Jong-Un,” read a banner they erected after arriving by ferry, in reference to the North’s leader and heir apparent.

Elsewhere, activists sent balloons with anti-Pyongyang leaflets, DVDs and one-dollar bills floating into the North across the heavily fortified frontier that divides the peninsula.

The messages urged people to rise up against the hardline regime.

With the nuclear disclosure and the bombardment, the North’s leaders “demonstrated their ability to create trouble more or less with impunity”, North Korea expert Andrei Lankov wrote in a commentary.

They “also hinted that they are not going to remain quiet if their demands for the resumption of unilateral aid and assorted political concessions are not met”.

Diplomatic efforts were continuing, however. Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said its minister Kim Sung-Hwan would attend a Kazakhstan summit of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe today and tomorrow.

It said he was expected to meet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines.