Those Are Somebody Else's Centrifuges, I've Never Seen Them Before

North Korea continues to think they are fooling people.

A State Department team is traveling to South Korea Sunday, after a U.S. scientist reported that North Korea has a new uranium enrichment facility.


North Korean officials said the facility is operating and producing low-enriched uranium, according to Stanford University professor Siegfried S. Hecker. The scientist posted a report of his November 12 visit to the Yongbyon, North Korea, facility on the university's website Saturday.

The enrichment program claim is "yet another provocative act of defiance and, if true, contradicts its own pledges and commitments," a senior official in U.S. President Barack Obama's administration said.

The State Department team departed for Asia to "begin to coordinate on a response to this news," the official said.

"We have long suspected North Korea of having this kind of capability, and we have regularly raised it with them directly and with our partners in this effort. North Korea has tried to use missiles and nuclear tests to threaten the international community and extract concessions," the administration official said.

The enrichment facility is comprised of 2,000 centrifuges, according to Hecker's report.

They appear to be designed for nuclear power production, "not to boost North Korea's military capability," Hecker says.

That may be all fine and good, but the point is we're supposed to know about it, and of course North Korea had a separate facility with plausible deniability all this time.  You would thinking dealing with Republicans negotiating in bad faith would prepare the Obama administration to handle the Norks, but I guess not.

Part of me is hoping Kim Jong Il's son takes over in a rapid fashion and starts acting like an adult.  The father clearly can't.