American experts announced that based on evidence they'd gathered, it appears North Korea has the ability to construct crucial equipment needed for uranium nuclear bombs on its own.
This would sever the need for imports that, up until this point, were one of the main ways outsiders could keep an eye on any atomic work going on within the secretive country's borders.
Experts told the Associated Press that some content published in North Korean scientific journals, along with some news spots in DPRK media suggests that scientists in Pyongyang have been working to crack the production of some necessary parts of gas centrifuges necessary for making nuclear bombs. If the DPRK doesn't import any of the materials needed for the production of nuclear weaponry, then the international community can't track their nuclear work. According to nuclear proliferation expert Joshua Pollack, who spoke at a symposium in Seoul, efforts to stop a nuclear bomb program that Pyongyang has insisted it will expand might suffer at the hands of these new developments.
"If they're not importing these goods in the first place, then we can't catch them in the act," Pollack, who worked in conjunction with Massachusetts Institute of Technology expert on centrifuge technology Scott Kemp, stated. "we won't necessarily see anything more than what the North Koreans want us to see."
Pollack and Kemp said they had "strong and clear" evidence in state media photographs snapped from within North Korean factories that showed lathes that produce metal cylinders used for centrifuge production. Pollack said that in North Korean technical publications, writers spoke of iron and steelmaking that were made in the same manner as a very hard steel also used in the production of centrifuges.
The North Korean nuclear program is kept completely secret, for the DPRK says it must keep its defense up against Western governmental bodies trying to overthrow its political order.
Earlier this month, images from North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility suggested that the country may have restarted its plutonium production reactor - largely seen by western officials as a necessary piece of machinery for creating nuclear weapons.
