Radioactive Slips

In the 1970s, South Korea ran a program to develop technology to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. By 1976, it was in the final stages of buying a reprocessing plant from France when the U.S. pressured Seoul to end the program. Washington suspected Korea wouldn't merely reprocess the fuel for power generation, but was planning to use the technology to make plutonium for atomic weapons. For Kim Chul, the nuclear expert who headed the project, the reprocessing dream never died. Kim keeps the only known copy of the project blueprints on a shelf in his study. "We should own that technology," says...