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Nuclear Deceit

Nuclear Deceit

Author: Jim Hoagland
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: November 10, 2002
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30449-2002Nov8.html

North Korea's determined covert pursuit of new nuclear weapons may stretch back five years and may now be on the verge of success. This much is certain: Pyongyang's recently uncovered nuclear deceit forces the world's powers to reexamine basic attitudes toward proliferation and deterrence.

The deceit was not a solitary, lunatic effort to trick the United States and overturn decades of nonproliferation rules and treaties. This was a calculated, strategic joint venture by North Korea and Pakistan. They conspired to ignore all rules and agreements -- especially Pyongyang's 1994 deal with the Clinton administration to freeze development of nuclear weapons -- and to share the right to possess atomic arsenals and missiles capable of vaporizing their neighbors.

A philosophical line in global nuclear politics has been crossed. Pakistan helped North Korea construct a secret centrifuge system of uranium enrichment in return for missile technology and equipment. But don't assume that this was just a crude barter between two destitute, irresponsible regimes.

This deal was also an implicit statement of revolt that reaches beyond local ambitions to confront India or South Korea or to ensure national survival and sovereignty. Selling or transferring nuclear-weapons material and technology to nations that have no connection to your national survival is a significant new development. That is why the key questions about what has happened -- and why -- must be pursued with Pakistan as well as North Korea.

The Bush administration is disinclined to ask President Pervez Musharraf those questions as the war on al Qaeda continues. That is shortsighted. If Pakistan will break the rules to help a distant pauper Asian dictatorship, how can it say no to rich Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Libya when they offer to buy an Islamic bomb? If there is no accounting from Pakistan, the major powers' pretense of control over the spread of nuclear weapons is exposed as one more giant fraud of the past heady decade.

This is Enron and WorldCom to the tenth power, with mushroom clouds in the background. Forensic accountants working with the CIA may have helped nail North Korea's crooked balance sheet. James Kelly, the State Department's top Asia expert, stunned North Korean officials in October by detailing the fraud.

The North Koreans then stunned Kelly by acknowledging the program. They even challenged him to do something about it. Other sources say that the North Koreans possess 2,000 to 3,000 centrifuges and are already enriching uranium.

This description suggests that North Korea is moving relentlessly toward a self-sustaining point of no return in the enrichment process. The numbers alone suggest that North Korea may require no further help from Pakistan to produce new bombs to go with the pair of atomic devices that Pyongyang assembled before the 1994 agreement subjected its plutonium-based program to inspections and a freeze.

"We developed hard confirmation of the program this summer," says a senior Bush administration official, who cited "shards of evidence" of the North Korea-Pakistan nuclear relationship going back to 1997. "Those turned into pretty clear suspicions by 1998, and by 1999 the North Koreans committed to this program."

Clinton administration officials confirm that timeline. Like Bush aides, they say they cannot know whether Pyongyang always intended to subvert the 1994 agreement or inexplicably changed course. But it is clear that the program predates President Bush's election and his placing of North Korea on the "axis of evil." The trigger for the deceit happened on Clinton's more amiable watch.

What to do now? "Well, we won't be getting into an elaborate agreement that depends on North Korea's word," says the Bush official. "We are pushing other nations to make it clear that North Korean entry into the international system can come only after it abandons this program." In plain English: China must apply pressure to its Communist-ruled neighbor, and Japan and South Korea must hold back financial aid and political recognition.

But the problem is broader and graver than North Korea's dying regime. The spread of nuclear weapons is now not only a global fact, but also a project and an intention for some of the Third World's most belligerent and angry regimes. They have watched with envy as Pakistan openly and repeatedly threatened nuclear war to block India's conventional retaliation for cross- border terrorism in and from Kashmir.

The United States must align itself with responsible nuclear powers that do not proliferate. Britain, France, India, Russia and Israel appear to fit that category. They must cooperate to constrain the appetites and abilities of irresponsible nuclear powers. North Korea and Pakistan stand at the top of the list of irresponsibles, and they must not be given leeway to help lengthen it.
 


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