
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 13, 1990                   TAG: 9004131025
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

N. KOREA MAY HAVE REACTOR

The United States believes North Korea has the facilities to build nuclear weapons but is not moving rapidly on the work, says a senior Pentagon official.

U.S. officials have evidence the North Koreans have built a reactor as well as a reprocessing facility to separate plutonium, the material used to make nuclear weapons, Henry Rowen, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said Thursday.

"I would not want to characterize it as a slow pace but a deliberate pace," Rowen told reporters at a news briefing. "However, it's not galloping ahead at a great rate. . . . It's a concern to us and the Japanese."

The Pentagon official said the United States raised the issue of North Korea's building nuclear weapons in talks in Washington last weekend between Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

"We hope that their influence would be enough to get it under control, get at least inspectors in there, preferably to end the whole thing, end the separation business," Rowen said. "So far, it hasn't borne fruit."

by CNB