N. Korea Destroys Nuke Cooling Tower

North Korea destroyed the most visible symbol of its nuclear weapons program Friday, blasting apart the cooling tower at an atomic reactor in a sign of its commitment to stop making plutonium for atomic bombs.

The demolition of the 60-foot-tall cooling tower at the North's main reactor complex is a response to U.S. concessions after the North delivered a declaration Thursday of its nuclear programs to be dismantled.

A single blast at the base of the cylindrical structure sent the tower collapsing into a cloud of white and gray smoke as international journalists and diplomats looked on, according to video footage filmed by broadcaster APTN at the site. Those at the event later pored over the shattered pieces of the tower.

"This is a very important step in the disablement process and I think it puts us in a good position to move into the next phase," said Sung Kim, the U.S. State Department's top expert on the Koreas who attended the demolition. Kim shook hands with North Korean officials following the tower's tumble to the ground.

The symbolic explosion came just 20 months after Pyongyang shocked the world by detonating a nuclear bomb in an underground test to confirm its status as an atomic power. The nuclear blast spurred an about-face in the U.S. hard-line policy against Pyongyang, leading to the North's first steps to scale back its nuclear weapons development since the reactor became operational in 1986.

Last year, the North switched off the reactor at Yongbyon, some 60 miles north of the capital of Pyongyang, and it has already begun disabling the facility under the watch of U.S. experts so that it cannot easily be restarted.

The destruction of the cooling tower, which carries off waste heat to the atmosphere, is another step forward but not the most technically significant, because it is a simple piece of equipment that would be easy to rebuild.

Still, the demolition offered the most photogenic moment yet in the disarmament negotiations that have dragged on for more than five years and suffered repeated deadlocks and delays. Those attending the event include the top U.S. State Department expert on the Koreas, Sung Kim, along with broadcasters from the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

The North has incentives to stay in Washington's good graces. President Bush said he would lift economic sanctions imposed under a U.S. law banning trade with enemy nations and that he would notify Congress that Washington would remove North Korea from a State Department list of terrorism-sponsoring countries in 45 days.

Hours after blowing up the cooling tower, the North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it "positively assesses" and "welcomes" the U.S. measures, and also urged Washington to completely withdraw its "hostile policy" toward Pyongyang.

The energy-starved country is also receiving the equivalent of 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil for the initial disarmament steps.

"If North Korea continues to make the right choices it can repair its relationship with the international community. ... If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and its partners in the six-party talks will act accordingly," Mr. Bush said.

The North's goodwill could also overcome obstacles to delivery of Washington's promised food aid of 500,000 tons and encourage other nations to join in providing humanitarian assistance for its impoverished 23 million people. The World Food Program says the first shipment of the U.S. food aid is supposed to arrive in Pyongyang this week, although food is not part of the sanctions or nuclear negotiations.

North Korea faces its worst food shortages in years due to severe floods that devastated farmland in 2007. It has relied on foreign handouts to feed its population since mismanagement and natural disasters devastated its economy in the mid-1990s, when as many as 2 million people are estimated to have died of famine.

The U.S. has acknowledged it is still far from the goal of disarming the North.

North Korea's nuclear declaration, which was delivered six months later than promised and has not yet been released publicly, was a slimmed down version of what the Bush administration initially sought, reported CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan.

The document said nothing about the nuclear weapons they have in stock, and nothing about their uranium enrichment program. Furthermore, the document revealed nothing about how North Korea is proliferating nuclear technology around the world, reported Logan.

The declaration was being distributed Friday by China, the chair of the arms talks, to the other countries involved, U.S. envoy Christopher Hill said in Kyoto, Japan.

"We'll have to study it very carefully and then we'll have to work on verification," Hill said.

Experts believe the North has as much as 110 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium, enough for as many as 10 nuclear bombs.

To verify the claim of how much radioactive material it has produced, the U.S. says the North will open access to its reactor for inspectors to pore over the aging equipment and come to their own conclusions. However, there will be no wide-ranging inspections to survey secret nuclear facilities, some of which are believed hidden in underground tunnels.

The declaration also does not include information on the North's alleged uranium enrichment program or its possible nuclear proliferation to other countries, such as Syria.

North Korea now views its reactor as "just large pieces of rusting metal," having already amassed enough nuclear weapons to deter any would-be attacker, said Andrei Lankov, an expert on the North who studied there and is a professor at Seoul's Kookmin University.

"For the dual purposes of blackmail and security, it's sufficient to have a small number of nuclear devices," he said.

Lankov said the North Koreans will likely never come entirely clean on its bombs.

"They know that without nuclear weapons, nobody will care about them," he said.