North Korea’s official press published images of a uranium enrichment plant for the first time on Friday.on the occasion of a visit by ruler Kim Jong-un to the National Nuclear Weapons Research Institute, in an undisclosed location.
It is the first time North Korea has provided details of its uranium enrichment facilities since the country carried out its first nuclear test in 2006.
These plants produce the enriched uranium necessary for nuclear weapons by spinning this element at high speed in centrifuges.
According to official media, Kim asked to build more centrifuges to increase the country’s atomic arsenal.
Images published by the KCNA propaganda agency show Kim visiting a plant – without specifying the date and location of the facilities – in the company of Hong Sung-mu, one of the main figures in the North Korean nuclear program, and touring a room in which shows a cascade of gas centrifuges.
During the visit, Kim “highlighted the need to further increase the number of centrifuges to exponentially increase the number of nuclear weapons for self-defense, in accordance with the Party’s lines to develop nuclear forces,” KCNA explained.
Kim, who visited the facility’s control room and was briefed on its operation, “expressed great satisfaction upon being informed that the current production of nuclear material (for bombs) is steadily expanding” thanks to the use and development of North Korean technology. .
The leader ordered to further improve the separation capacity of centrifuges and promote the introduction of a new type of centrifuge, whose development is in its final stage, according to KCNA.
Insists on security threats
Kim Jong-un, who also visited the warehouses under construction to house more centrifugesonce again insisted that the current security panorama for his country represents a “threat” and that this requires improving nuclear capabilities in defensive terms and to launch preventive attacks.
Until now the North Korean regime had never publicly shown any of its facilities to obtain uranium-235, although it had allowed figures such as the American scientist Siegfried Hecker to visit at the beginning of the last decade an enclosure at the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center (about 100 kilometers north of Pyongyang) that contained some 2,000 gas centrifuges.
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