May 11, 1999
Seoul, South Korea - U.S. experts will visit an underground construction site in North Korea on May 20 to try to determine whether the facility is being built for nuclear weapons development, North Korea said Tuesday.
The North's Foreign Ministry invited a team of U.S. technical experts to visit the tunnel in Kumchang-ri, northwest of the North's capital of Pyongyang, said the country's official Korean Central News Agency. After lengthy negotiations, North Korea agreed in March to allow American inspectors to visit the site.
The U.S. team will arrive in North Korea next Tuesday and begin its inspection of the tunnel two days later, said KCNA, which was monitored in Seoul.
Washington suspects North Korea may be reactivating a nuclear weapons program frozen under a 1994 agreement with Washington. Pyongyang has denied that the activities at the site are nuclear-related.
Suspicion arose over Pyongyang's sincerity when U.S. spy satellite images last summer showed thousands of North Koreans burrowing into a hillside 25 miles northwest of the nation's main nuclear complex of Yongbyon.
