Trump says US has discovered unreported nuclear facilities in North Korea

US President Donald Trump holds a press conference at the JW Marriott Hotel Hanoi following his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Feb. 28. (Park Jong-shik, staff photographer)

Alludes to uranium enrichment facility outside of Yongbyon

While explaining why he wasn’t able to reach an agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Feb. 28, US President Donald Trump said that the US has discovered previously unreported North Korean nuclear facilities in addition to the Yongbyon nuclear complex. While research institutes and intelligence agencies have made reports about the North’s undisclosed nuclear facilities, this is the first time that Trump has mentioned them publicly.

When asked whether he’d wanted something other than the closure of the Yongbyon nuclear complex in a press conference held at the JW Marriott Hotel, where he was staying, Trump said, “We had to have more than that because there are other things that you haven’t talked about [. . .] that we found.”

Responding to a follow-up question about whether Trump meant a uranium enrichment plant, he said, “Exactly. And we brought many, many points up that I think they were surprised that we knew.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who attended the press conference with Trump, also explained that North Korea had an extremely large nuclear facility in addition to the Yongbyon complex.

It’s unclear what Trump was referring to when he mentioned the other North Korean nuclear facilities. One of the likely candidates is the Kangson uranium enrichment facility that was reported by the US media around the time of the first North Korea-US summit in Singapore last year. Quoting a report by the Institute for Science and International Security and analysis by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, US media reported that North Korea was secretly operating a uranium enrichment facility called Kangson and that the facility was twice as big as Yongbyon. That would coincide with Pompeo’s remarks about an extremely large nuclear facility. Later, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies identified Chollima District in Nampo, South Pyongan Province, as the location of the Kangson nuclear facility, based on its analysis of satellite imagery taken since 2001.

Suspected Kangson Enrichment Site

This site remained vacant until 2001, and the first imagery of buildings going up was apparently captured in April 2002. North Korea reportedly acquired uranium enrichment technology and centrifuges from Pakistan between 1998 and 2002. For this reason, some regard this site as being North Korea’s first uranium enrichment facility, predating the Yongbyon nuclear complex. US intelligence agencies reportedly have kept an eye on the site since 2007 but didn’t suspect it of being a nuclear facility until 2010.

Considering that Trump said he thought the North Koreans were “surprised,” he might also have been talking about a previously unreported underground facility. US intelligence agencies have suspected that North Korea runs secret underground nuclear facilities. During an interview with the Voice of America in July 2018, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said that Kangson is not an underground nuclear facility and noted the possibility of more undisclosed facilities being located underground.

By Yoo Kang-moon, senior staff writer

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