Later builders inserted metal rods into wet concrete walls, thereby reinforcing the structures they support.
He had workers widen concrete pillars and insert iron rods into them.
Three years ago, would North Korea have felt so free to trumpet its conversion of fuel rods into bombs?
The sight, he said, makes him uneasy: workers digging under the east wall of his 30-story landmark building and drilling reinforcing rods into it.
North Korea boasted in April that it was working to convert its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium.
At the shoreline, there were fishermen, dozens of them, standing at ten-yard intervals and casting long spinning rods into the metallic throb of the sea.
American intelligence satellites have been closely watching a nearby reprocessor, which can be used to convert spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium.
And American officials are struggling to figure out how far North Korea has gone in reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium for nuclear arms.
But it could take time to detect the radioactive signatures of that process, which involves breaking down 8,000 spent fuel rods into bomb-grade plutonium.
Working in the chemistry department, Mr. Lafler, 56, of Ridge, molds long glass rods into scientific apparatus and transforms mass-produced glassware into labyrinths of cylinders and bubbles.
They note that when the North last turned fuel rods into bombs, in 1991, they went undetected by intelligence agencies for years.
