BEIJING — North Korea on Friday demolished a cooling tower for its main nuclear reactor in a televised spectacle designed to display its sincerity about dismantling its weapons program.
The destruction of the 60-foot-high tower took place less than a day after President Bush announced he was removing Pyongyang from the State Department list of terror-sponsoring nations and lifting some other sanctions. The televised demolition had been suggested by North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Il is a cinema buff famous for his flare for the theatrical.
But it served the purposes of President Bush, looking for to a photo opportunity — which like the collapse of the Berlin Wall for Ronald Reagan — would bolster his legacy after leaving office.
North Korea had invited television crews from the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia as witnesses to the demolition at Yongbyon, a nuclear compound 60 miles north of Pyongyang. Those nations were parties to six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear dismantlement.
The television crews had originally hoped to broadcast live from the scene, but were unable because of the poor communications facilities in North Korea, one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the world. The footage is expected to be broadcast today in the United States by CNN.
The spectacle is being greeted with widespread skepticism because of North Korea's long history of renegging on deals. Although the cooling tower is the most iconic symbol of a nuclear reactor, it is one of the easier parts to rebuild, being basically a big cylinder of concrete.
"It is a visual thing. People get excited when they watch things blow up or fireworks, but the North Koreans are good with concrete. They could probably rebuild it in a month,'' said Daniel Pinkston, a senior analyst based in Seoul with the International Crisis Group.
North Korea and the United States are following what diplomats call "action for action,'' a sequenced series of concessions. On Thursday, North Korea submitted a 60-page report detailing the scope of its nuclear program, a step that the Bush administration had demanded as a prerequisite for removing the terror-sponsor designation.
According to analysts familiar with the North Korean nuclear program, Pyongyang was likely to admit to a stockpile of about 90 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium which it has produced at Yongbyon since 1986. The plutonium is enough for six to seven nuclear bombs.
However, under a controversial compromise struck by the Bush administration, Pyongyang was allowed to omit detailed information about a nuclear test it conducted in October 2006 and about completed weapons. The documents also gloss over a secretive nuclear program that uses highly enriched uranium -- an alternative to plutonium--for bombmaking.
In 2002, Bush used evidence of that uranium program as his justification for breaking off a denuclearization deal struck by the Clinton administration. Bush's critics – both liberals and conservatives – complain that he hasn't come up with anything better than his predecessors and lost six years in trying.
