Money may not pry nuclear secrets from North Korea

By Jon Herskovitz - Analysis

SEOUL (Reuters) - Secretive North Korea finally bowed to international pressure to close its nuclear facilities, but the final goal of making it completely give up its atomic weaponry remains extremely remote, analysts say.

North Korea shut its nuclear reactor and plant that makes weapons-grade plutonium as part of a disarmament-for-aid deal, just as six-country talks got underway this week in Beijing aimed at advancing the process.

In what could be a sign of the difficulties ahead, those discussions ended on Friday without the firm year-end deadline for further steps most participants hoped for.

Regional powers want North Korea to account for its nuclear inventory, dismantle facilities and give up the fissile material it has squirreled away to make atomic bombs.

But for impoverished North Korea, analysts say the threat of attack is about its only bargaining chip and it is unlikely to give up the most powerful component of that threat -- nuclear arms.

"For North Korea, blackmail doesn't just work, it works wonders," said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea analyst and professor at Kookmin University.

North Korea has agreed to fully account for its known plutonium stockpiles in a deal reached with South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

But even with the promise of massive aid and losing the stigma of being an international pariah by complying, no one is sure if Pyongyang will completely disclose details of its plans to enrich uranium for weapons or ever let the world know what it has been doing in secret.

"This is a program that the North has staked the fate of its regime on," said Cho Min, a North Korea expert at the South's Korea institute for National Unification.

And there is no known public case of a country actually exploding a nuclear device, as North Korea did in October 2006, and then abandoning that ability.

TUNNELS

The paranoid state has been a prodigious digger of tunnels for decades to hide its most guarded secrets.

Intelligence sources have said the North likely has hundreds of large facilities and thousands of smaller ones underground or in mountains where it secretly works to build nuclear arms, missiles and other weapons.

North Korea's main nuclear complex at Yongbyon is located in plain view of U.S. spy satellites. Disabling its key components -- a reactor, a plutonium separation plant and a fuel fabrication factory -- will likely require substantial payments of money or goods to North Korea for each step that is taken, officials have suggested.

What it has done already was directly linked to shipments of heavy fuel oil, and stalled for months when Pyongyang also demanded the end of a freeze on some of its funds held abroad.