The late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il ordered his scientists to produce “a massive amount” of uranium bombs, according to internal regime documents, reports in Japan said on Monday.
The instruction was revealed in papers believed to have been compiled in February this year for senior officials of the ruling Workers’ Party, the Mainichi Shimbun and Tokyo Shimbun said. Pyongyang has long maintained that it was enriching uranium solely for the purpose of power generation, despite widespread suspicion.
But the document, detailing domestic and foreign policies, said Kim Jong-Il, who died in December, ordered the production of nuclear weapons using both uranium and plutonium.
It refers to spot inspections on uranium-enrichment facilities carried out by US experts in November 2010, which followed plutonium bomb tests in 2006 and 2009. “US and other hostile forces were complaining we are trying to produce uranium to make nuclear weapons,” the document said, the Mainichi reported under a Beijing dateline.