Left Flank

Here's a decidedly minority opinion about the consequences of Pyongyang's latest Six-Party reactions (via Observing Japan's «Bush tries to reassure Japan»:).

...it can be argued that the Six Party process, whatever its outcome, is helping to 'socialise' the Pyongyang regime, bringing it closer to the international community and making it slightly less likely that North Korea would ever use its weapons.

I have one problem with this intriguing notion. It works if Pyongyang has truly decided to change its ways. Yet, if consensus within the Six-Party process breaks down, then Pyongyang could reassert itself by resuming a divide-and-conquer strategy, with at least Beijing and Moscow in its corner. And, also, if the US is not sincere about the Six-Party process (which is different from what Roggeveen argues contra OFK), then, again, consensus and pressure on Pyongyang might fracture.

The problem I see with the DPRK nuclear issue is, that it is rarely a front-burner issue. A.Q, Khan's «Pakistani Pipeline» might have supplied enriched uranium technology. Beijing's diplomatic and economic influence on Pyongyang trumps American and South Korean efforts. Unification is politically more immediate in most South Koreans' minds. Japanese conservatives want the abductions issue resolved.

Pyongyang survives because its opponents don't.

On The Charlie Rose Show, David Sanger provides an excellent introduction to a wide range of subjects related to nuclear proliferation, including the recent destruction of DPRK's Yongbyon cooling tower, Iran, A.Q. Khan, and Syria. Phillip Carter has a slightly different read on how the Afghanistan and Iraq wars affected the negotiations with Pyongyang.

What I'm hearing through the grapevine is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required so much attention from senior decision makers that it allowed career diplomats and junior political appointees to do their work in East Asia. In essence, the six-party talks needed less attention to work well, so that diplomats and national leaders could get down to business without all of the posturing that goes along with highly public diplomacy. This may or may not be true, but it's an interesting view of how diplomacy can work. I look forward to learning the full story.

Or, in other words, our bench saved our áššëš! This must be the hardliners' sop to what Sanger heard from the diplomats.

Total Wonkerr's Paul advises patience, as Pyongyang delivers its mandated nuclear declaration:

will North Korea really agree to verification for anything beyond Yongbyon, at least in the near future? I suspect we will either be looking at more than the three phases envisioned, or a «phase three» with quite a few sub-phases to get to that point.

Yet, Leslie Gelb and Winston Lord also caution against being too soft on Pyongyang, and I agree. Tobe fair, this is the anti-Nork and ROK expat line, too. (only with extra fury and scorn added). DPRK Studies obliges with customary rant and links. The hardliners are so apoplectic they would even feature the testimony of a traitor, Charles Jenkins. Robert Koehler calls the outcome a «...steaming load of çráp.»

It is one thing to compromise in order to craft an agreement, keep difficult negotiations going and not let the best be the enemy of the good. It is another thing to let the other side breach compromises already reached.

President Bush's remarks at his meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak last weekend suggest that he still may stiffen his stance. We hope so. Our fear, however, is that Bush, feeling the glow of a rare foreign policy accomplishment, may proceed to cement a legacy. He should consider the criticism he would heap upon his successor if he or she were to ink such a deal.

The two of us can hardly be counted as conservative die-hards opposing deals with Pyongyang. We believe that Washington and its allies are rightly committed to exploring even the remotest chance that Pyongyang might give up its nuclear weapons. While reaching for that larger goal, our negotiators can seek to cap North Korea's nuclear inventory and head off proliferation.

We oppose both abandoning the September 2005 agreement and allowing Pyongyang to eviscerate it. Better to let the talks continue than to make one-sided concessions. Better to sharpen North Korean compliance or—failing that—to string out our own.

Bush can sustain international unity by making clear that his goal is to hold Pyongyang to its 2005 commitments. This is the only way to preserve American credibility and bargaining leverage. It is also the only way to maintain political support in Washington for these difficult negotiations.

This is the legacy Bush should bequeath to his successor.

Westhawk trumps all with canny geopolitical insight. After flirting with the notion, that the Bush administration is pursuing vainly its historical legacy, Westhawk highlights the PRC-US relationship that's more important than Washington's with Pyongyang (but, as I have argued, the nuclear non-proliferation regime):

The North Korean regime has been a troublemaker for decades, and continues to be, if the allegations concerning the now-destroyed Syrian plutonium reactor are correct. We should expect North Korea to continue to be a troublemaker in the future; extortion and noxious weapon sales are the only sources of hard currency for the regime.

Yet by making this deal with North Korea, the Bush administration has taken pressure off the regime and extended its life. By extending its life, the U.S. has extended the period during which the North Koreans will be able to cause trouble for the U.S. and its allies.

If this is the case, why did the Bush administration make this deal?

End-of-term vanity might be one explanation. A more substantive reason might have to do with China. A collapse of the North Korean regime would immediately bring trouble to China. China does not like it when North Korea causes trouble. But neither does China want North Korea to collapse. For China, the best outcome for now is maintenance of the status quo. Which is what today's deal extends.

So is Secretary Rice's deal a favor to the Chinese, a deal-within-a-deal? By helping the Chinese avoid a problem with North Korea, will the Chinese now help the U.S. somewhere else, perhaps with Iran?

Is today's deal clever grand strategy by President Bush and Secretary Rice? Or just petty vanity displayed by an administration soon to leave office? We should know the answer soon enough.

October 1949? June 25, 1950? Does time ever move forward in this neck of the woods? Is the US forever fated to stand athwart the shadow of Beijing's colossus, with nary a well-conceived strategy about what to do about it? Beijing's 58 year old Pyongyang gambit is still dragging on.

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The Economist explores the role of A.Q. Khan's in Iran's and DPRK's nuclear programs.

The network's customers for other nuclear technologies and equipment were Libya, Iran and North Korea, though suspicion has at times attached to Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria too. But Libya has been out of the bomb business since 2003. Jaws dropped when among the haul of equipment and documents it handed to inspectors was an Islamabad dry-cleaner's bag containing most (not all) of the drawings for a clunky Chinese-designed nuclear weapon from the 1960s, given to Pakistan before China decided that spreading the bomb was a dumb idea.

Unlike the Maoist model, the modern, computerised bomb design would fit easily on Pakistan's Ghauri missiles. Pakistan denies it, but these are a knock-off of North Korea's 1,300km-range Nodong rockets. Pakistan appears to have paid for its Ghauris with some nuclear assistance. Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, denies this too. But in his autobiography he admitted that the Khan network had supplied Kim Jong Il's regime with some 20 uranium-enriching centrifuges.

Whatever the truth behind their missile deal, Pakistani officials were genuinely shocked to be told recently that Mr Khan was selling their most closely guarded weapons secrets too, according to Mr Albright. North Korea did test a nuclear device, in 2006. But its bomb used home-produced plutonium from Mr Kim's Yongbyon nuclear reactor for its fissile core; the Pakistani design touted by Mr Khan and his partners uses uranium.

Despite other evidence to the contrary, North Korea insists it got no uranium help from Pakistan or anywhere else. Recently (or so America and Israel say) it was caught out helping Syria to build a nuclear reactor (which Israel later flattened) that could produce plutonium for weapons, just like Yongbyon did. America seems ready to let both these matters go for now, so long as Mr Kim furnishes an accurate and verifiable inventory of his plutonium production. The gamble is that this would be a big step towards a six-party deal, to include South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, that could lead eventually to the dismantling of all North Korea's nuclear programmes.

Unlike Libya and North Korea, Iran flatly denies any weapons intent. It bought uranium-spinning equipment from Mr Khan, but says its nuclear work is entirely peaceful. Yet it has defied a string of UN Security Council resolutions demanding that the work be halted until inspectors can be sure of that. The trouble is that uranium enriched a little can be used in nuclear-power reactors, but when enriched a lot can be abused for bomb-building.

Iran's determination to enrich on regardless looks like dooming the latest offer of negotiations from America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. The six have promised Iran assistance with other, less proliferation-prone nuclear technology, and direct talks on a whole range of economic, trade and security issues that Iran itself raised in a set of counter-proposals last month. A crucial difference between the two offers is that Iran wants to enrich on regardless, on its own territory, whereas the six insist the work be suspended before negotiations start.

Unless Iran shows willing, says Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, European governments are prepared to extend their sanctions on Iran, for example by freezing the overseas assets of Bank Melli, Iran's largest commercial bank. (That move is not quite a done deal, but Mr Brown is confident it soon will be.) Despite record world energy prices, the Europeans may consider blocking investment in Iran's oil and gas industries too. America already has tough sanctions in place, though Russia and China do not.

Iran's insistence on enriching, whatever the cost, deepens suspicion of its motives. Now there are more worries. Like Pakistan's Ghauri missiles, Iran's Shahab-3 rockets are clones of Mr Kim's Nodongs. So the Khan network's modern warhead design would fit them just as nicely.

There is no evidence of any such transaction, but American and other intelligence agencies recently showed nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear guardian, evidence pointing to Iranian weapons work which America thinks may have stopped in 2003—though others believe it continues. This includes both high-explosive testing for possible nuclear triggers and work on a Shahab-3 missile cone to accommodate a nuclear warhead. Iran has dismissed the material as fabricated. But it has yet to give a convincing explanation of why it had a document, supplied by Mr Khan and his associates, on shaping uranium into spheres—a technique useful only in weapons building.

ACW's jeffrey offers technical observations: «What does seem likely is that the device is small enough for the Nodong family, which includes Pakistan's Ghauri and Iran's Shahab.»

Yet, again, it's the politics that worries and infuriates me. The Bush administration is still coddling Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, an approach CFR's Charles D. Ferguson would prefer to see replaced with a different diplomatic process. Ferguson rightly admits there are Washington officials, notwithstanding how the Tinners allegedly fooled the CIA after 2003 (via Danger Room's «Nuke Smuggler Peddled Missile-Ready Bomb Designs (Updated Again)», who have known about Khan's illicit activities for decades.

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Of all the harrowing revelations repeated in two reports in the WaPo and NYT concerning the relationship between the Swiss, the Tinner family, A.Q. Khan, Pakistan, the IAEA…and so many other players, there are the two sentences buried deep beneath the lede.

NYT's David E. Sanger is most concerned about Iran.

Two former Bush administration officials said they believed Mr. Tinner had provided information to the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still working for Dr. Khan, including some of the information that helped American and British officials intercept shipments of centrifuges on their way to Libya in 2003.

WaPo's Joby Warrick highlights those rogue states, Iran and North Korea.

A CIA official, informed of the essential details of Albright's report, said the agency would not comment because of the extreme diplomatic and security sensitivities of the matter. In his 2007 memoir, former CIA director George Tenet acknowledged the agency's extensive involvement in tracking the Khan network over more than a decade.

This is the part that scares me: the CIA knew.

While some of this is well known, a series of little-publicized letters between Khan and a Canadian-Pakistani engineer, Aziz Abdul Khan, in 1978 and 1979 offer a revealing look at the degree to which globalization shaped Pakistan's nuclear program. The so-called Islamic bomb turns out not to be an indigenous product, but instead a little bit American, Canadian, Swiss, German, Dutch, British, Japanese, and even Russian.

Aziz Khan was one of dozens of Pakistani scientists living abroad whom Khan tried to recruit for what he described as a "project of national importance." According to the letters between them, while Aziz Khan declined the offer, he agreed to provide A.Q. Khan with scientific literature and to spend his vacations at A.Q. Khan's laboratory outside of Islamabad, training and mentoring young engineers.

We obtained the letters -- which cover the comings and goings of nuclear experts from nine different countries -- from an American government official, who, in turn, received them from Canadian law enforcement officers after they were taken from Aziz Khan, following his arrest in Montreal in 1980.

These exchanges provide a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into Khan's nuclear Wal-Mart in its infancy, long before he began peddling his finished wares to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. After a decade of diplomatic rhetoric about the need to stop the spread of nuclear technology, they also offer a window into the ineffectiveness of American and European export controls. By setting these letters -- often colorfully translated from Urdu by the Canadian authorities -- against the backdrop of the news coverage of the time, you can see just how disturbingly international the assistance was that Khan received.

(…)

Khan's success in obtaining nuclear material abroad did not go unnoticed. American intelligence watched his procurement operation and U.S. officials occasionally complained in public, prompting Aziz Khan to write in June 1979: "There is no doubt that you guys made people here sleepless…. These days you are famous all over the world."

In August of 1979, still struggling, Khan wrote his friend of a deal that he could not consummate in Canada, probably a reference to difficulties obtaining a specialized type of inverter essential to operating the uranium enrichment plant.

"You must be reading that your countrymen have decided to drink our blood. The way they are after us, it looks as if we have killed their mother. Their building of castles in the air has beaten the Arabian Nights. There is lots of pressure, but I have trust in God in doing my work. I am thinking, if I finish this job, then I would solve the purpose of my life."

Khan did indeed overcome the obstacles -- with plenty of help from his friends around the world. And he had learned his lesson well. When he was finished helping Pakistan build its bomb, he turned his talents to another kind of globalization -- marketing his wares, and those of his associates from Europe, Asia, and South Africa, to a new set of clients.

That's just the shorter version of a longer, more depressing tale (How Can You Mend a Broken System?, How CIA Let Khan Go, Nuclear Wal-Mart).

I hope better stories will follow, and both newspapers are just warming up, not closing their eyes.

I share ACW's dismay, that "the Swiss shredded the evidence" of Urs Tinner's involvement with A.Q. Khan.

Investigative journalist Douglas Frantz claims that Urs Tinner and his family, who are at the center of a Swiss government decision to shred documents implicating all three men in A.Q. Khan's nuclear Wal-Mart, is a CIA stooge. Listen to Frantz discuss the case on WRS.

Michael von der Galien pleads, referring to documents including blueprints and manuals for manufacturing nuclear devices circulated by A.Q. Khan:

For some reason, some governments seem to underestimate the danger terrorists and their buddies pose to the West, and to the world as a whole. Still. 7 years after 9/11. Is there anyone who doubts that terrorists will use weapons of mass destruction if they can get their hands on them?

Something has to be done about the black market; this threat has to be removed.

Urs Tinner and his son, according to Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in The Nuclear Jihadist, did not operate unnoticed. The central issue is not, that A.Q. Khan and Tinner operated as they did. It's that the CIA refused to share the information it had since the 1970s about Khan with both American administrations, and American and foreign and international law enforcement and regulatory agencies. When the CIA did divulge the information, its excuse was, that law enforcement activities would impede intelligence-gathering. And, after being told, successive American administrations, both Democratic and Republican, subordinated the non-proliferation issue to short-term strategic issues, like the Soviet-Afghan War and relations with Pakistan's ISI.

In the meantime successive Pakistani regimes considered the acquisition of a uranium-based nuclear device, that A.Q. Khan promised, a matter of life or death with India. The CIA could have stopped Khan dead in his tracks in the late 70s when he was copying documents from a Dutch firm. So, I ask, even if former PM Benazir Bhutto slipped documents to Pyongyang, who is really responsible in the chain of causation from Khan to any terrorist group or rogue state with a bomb?

Three letters...starts with a C...

Sometimes a line is actually a series of concentric circles. DPRK and nuclear non-proliferation are two such issues, related but not overlapping. The 2008 American general elections only make this even more confusing.

Republican frontrunner John McCain's non-proliferation speech is a muddle. "[H]is proposals – many of which might sound good – don't match up with other things he has said on nuclear weapons, on Russia, on Iran and suggests he doesn't really get the complexity of these issues." It's hard to cobble together issues requiring coherence in an election season with disparate constituencies to placate, and non-proliferation seemingly has fallen regrettably into that default. The DPRK-related stuff shows the marks.

There are two DPRK-related issues: nukes and ending the Korean War. Liberals follow Pyongyang's line, that the two overlap, only the order is reversed in each case. Pyongyang wants recognition in return for which it promises to give up its nuclear programs; American liberals want at least the plutonium program and will then reward Pyongyang with diplomatic recognition. Conservatives just want to end Kim Jong-il's tyranny.

First (and just one example), the «less safe» call discounts or is oblivious to North Korea's highly enriched uranium program that put North Korea in breach of the 1994 Agreed Framework, or the fact that the Clinton administration swept that mess under the rug. For the record, any uranium program absolutely violated the 1994 agreement.

Second, ejecting the Bush administration's current policy of appeasement and going back to something that actually hurt Kim Jong-il's regime is ringing endorsement of John McCain's North Korea policy. Reinforcing that sentiment are statements made by McCain in 2006 (when Bush wasn't in Legacy Mode), a summary of his position from the Council on Foreign Relations, and information from his campaign website.

The problem with the DNC position is that you'd have to either delusional or ignorant of the history of relevant issues to believe that any real progress is being made right now. Under the 13 February 2007 agreement (DOC), North Korea was supposed to submit, «a list of all its nuclear programs as described in the Joint Statement,» over a year ago, and even the extended deadline is nearly six months over due. The Bush administration is now backsliding on those requirements. And the DNC somehow thinks that's the path to take? Appeasement would make American «safe»?

The Bush administration has tacked toward the liberals politically after putting everything on regime change early.

The missing link is an international component. All the afore-mentioned groups downplay how US non-proliferation policy from the 1970s to now has offered little more than inter-agency quarrels, between successive American administrations and the IAEA, and between various tribes of the American government, to compete for non-proliferation policy and short-term strategic goals. Non-proliferation has always lost. DPRK slipped through the cracks as a direct result of American negligence to shut down the AQ Khan network in its infancy. Tackling the issue now requires more multilateral consistency and effort than McCain (and here I disagree with Blake Hounshell) can conceivably tolerate or imagine. Related to this is the resolution to the question of American strategic interests in East Asia. However, these interests shouldn't conflict with the multilateral goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, which is where the US has been historically and hypocritically negligent.