Left Flank

Putting the al-Kibar «reactor» disclosures into a geostrategic framework is necessary. Stratfor's George Friedman discusses a possible Israel-Syria agreement:

Iran will not be happy about all this. Tehran has invested a fair amount of resources in bulking up Hezbollah, and will not be pleased to see the militia shift from Syrian management to Syrian control. But in the end, what can Iran do? It cannot support Hezbollah directly, and even if it were to attempt to undermine Damascus, those Syrians most susceptible to Tehran's Shiite-flavored entreaties are the Alawites themselves.

The other player that at the very least would be uneasy about all of this is the United States. The American view of Syria remains extremely negative, still driven by the sense that the Syrians continue to empower militants in Iraq. Certainly that aid — and that negative U.S. feeling — is not as intense as it was two years ago, but the Americans might not feel that this is the right time for such a deal. Thus, the release of the information on the Syrian reactor might well have been an attempt to throw a spoke in the wheel of the Israeli-Syrian negotiations.

This interpretation is further reinforced by independent analyses of those videos from al-Kibar.

Professor William Beeman at the University of Minnesota passed along a note today from «a colleague with a U.S. security clearance» about the mysterious Syrian site targeted in a Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike.

The note raises more questions about the evidence shown last week by U.S. intelligence officials to lawmakers in the House and Senate.

1. Satellite photos of the alleged reactor building show no air defenses or anti-aircraft batteries such as the ones found around the Natanz nuclear site in central Iran.
2. The satellite images do not show any military checkpoints on roads near the building.
3. Where are the power lines? The photos show neither electricity lines or substations.
4. Here is a link to a photo of the North Korean facility that the Syrian site was based on. Look at all the buildings surrounding it. The Syrian site was just one building.

The author of the note pinpoints irregularities about the photographs. Beeman's source alleges that the CIA «enhanced» some of the images.

Gee, I feel so empowered to be a minor dupe in a diplomatic ploy!

DPRK Forum creditably serves up the video facts and timeline on the Dayr az-Zwar reactor incident. The Economist is skeptical:

Many facts remain contested. White House officials told Congress that the reactor had «striking similarities» to North Korea's facility at Yongbyon. Footage presented to Congress is said to show Korean faces at the Syrian site. But David Albright and Paul Brannan, in an analysis for the Institute for Science and International Security, an American think-tank, note that evidence is missing for a Syrian weaponisation programme or for plutonium-separation facilities. The North Koreans may well have helped to build the site, but they say more evidence is needed to be sure that Syria had a bomb programme.

The target of Thursday's hearing was not Syria in the main. The Bush administration is divided over North Korea. Years of efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme have been driven both by the American government and by six-party talks that involve China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, North Korea and America. Last year North Korea agreed to dismantle the Yongbyon facility, as part of a deal agreed in 2005 that requires it to declare and dismantle all of its nuclear programmes. However progress was stalled several times, including after a row over the release of funds claimed by North Korea.

A smooth-talking American diplomat, Christopher Hill, was deployed to persuade North Korea to take the steps needed to move ahead with the deal. North Korea has publicly acknowledged its plutonium-making but is reluctant to own up publicly to efforts to import equipment for producing uranium and about nuclear help to Syria. Mr Hill has been working on a deal that would let North Korea acknowledge America's concerns about both these activities, while pushing ahead with dismantling its plutonium-making reactor at Yongbyon. But hawks in the administration, and outside critics, dislike the idea of any concessions to North Korea and want to ensure that the country is compelled to account for and dismantle the parallel uranium programme, such as it was.

Congress began threatening to cut off funding for Mr Hill's efforts unless the administration produced all the information it had about North Korea's proliferation activity. This resulted in the hearings on Thursday. Some conspiracy theorists think that the briefing was designed to embarrass the North Koreans and to provoke them to flounce out of the deal, pleasing the hawkish types who never liked it.

But it comes at a curious time on several fronts. Another American diplomat was in North Korea as the briefing took place, and the country's news agency reported that talks were held «in a sincere and constructive manner». Jamie Metzl, a Korea expert at the Asia Society in New York (and a former National Security Council staffer under Bill Clinton), notes that the agreement with North Korea essentially forgives past sins and focuses on disarming North Korea in the future. Thus the North Koreans have an incentive to confess and get this behind them, in order to get promised aid and other concessions.

Nukes of Hazard also points readers to an April 24 ISIS statement on the US video:

The release of this information is likely to prompt a fresh wave of questions about North Korea's commitment to verifiably dismantle its nuclear arsenal and halt its proliferation activities. This new information confirms the need to be concerned about Syrian and North Korean actions, including their nuclear cooperation which dates back many years. However, it should not be seen as a casus belli against Syria or a reason to scuttle the progress being made at the Six Party Talks in disabling and dismantling North Korea's nuclear arsenal.

First, the United States does not have any indication of how Syria would fuel this reactor, and no information that North Korea had already, or intended to provide the reactor's fuel. This type of reactor requires a large supply of uranium fuel. The lack of any identified source of this fuel raises questions about when the reactor could have operated, despite evidence that it was nearing completion at the time of the attack.

Second, the United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation or nuclear weaponization facilities. The absence of such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor was part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent absence of fuel, whether imported or indigenously produced, also lowers confidence that Syria has an active nuclear weapons program.

If OFK's account of the Congressional hearings and this exchange on the Lehrer Newshour are any indication of the useless invective with which conservatives have infused this debate, it's hard to evaluate any of this. One aspect of the A.Q. Khan investigations troubles me in this regard. CIA knew of Khan's activities as far back as the 70s before Khan even assembled a centrifuge in Pakistan. Yet, intelligence officials refused to share their evidence with international agencies, like the IAEA, whose job it is to investigate and regulate, out of simple ideological pique.

WangKon936 asks, "So, is the Bush administration genuinely concerned about proliferation and North Korea, or is this a clumsy neocon plot?" The goal then, as now, is partisan, and not on improving the international regime, or even presenting a unified national position in a diplomatic negotiation.

Skepticism is greeting Israeli satellite photos of the Dayr az Zawr construction site its air force bombed on September 6. The Washington Post continues to match skepticism with misleading headlines:

Some nuclear experts urged caution in interpreting the photos, noting that the type of reactor favored by North Korea has few distinguishing characteristics visible from the air. Unlike commercial nuclear power reactors, for example, a North Korea-style reactor lacks the distinctive, dome-shaped containment vessel that prevents the release of radiation in the event of a nuclear accident.

«You can look at North Korea's [reactor] buildings, and they look like nothing,» said John E. Pike, a nuclear expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org. «They're just metal-skinned industrial buildings.» The proximity of the building to a water source also is not significant by itself, Pike said.

But Brannan, of ISIS, combed through a huge amount of satellite imagery to find a site along the Euphrates that matches a reactor's specifications as well as descriptions of the attack site. The compound's distance from populated areas was a key detail, since reactors are usually isolated from major urban populations.

The site is also close to an irrigated area, which would explain statements by some officials privy to details of the attack that the facility was located near orchards. A small airstrip about two miles away could have been used to transport personnel to the site.

Jeffrey Lewis (via FP Passport) is skeptical about that connection to water.

The problem here is that North Korea?s reactors are gas-cooled. You see, if there is a pump , the reactor can not be, as David Sanger and Mark Mazzetti reported, ?modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons.? (A careful reader in the comments points out that the pump could be for a secondary cooling tower like the one at Yongbyon, a possibility that I neglected.)

So, one of the two stories is dead wrong. It either is either water-cooled or it resembles the reactor at Yongbyon, which is gas-cooled.

Now, in addition to light-water reactors, a heavy water reactor, like Iran is building at Arak, would have pumps. No one, however, seems to be suggesting an Iran-Syria link. I am not sure why ? perhaps the pump drew H₂0 from the river.

It's clear the problem here is political-the truth might just be too inconvenient to accept.

McClatchy's Tim Johnson just has to enable my predilection for all-inclusive theories that efficiently allow me to post just once in a pithy way. The latest gem? Kim Jong-il tips his hat to Moammar Khaddafy.

So here goes the latest speculation: Just as Khaddafy won the good graces of the West by spilling the beans on the A.Q. Khan nuclear network, getting Libya out of the diplomatic doghouse, Kim Jong Il has now offered Washington the list of the buyers of its nuclear technology, including Syria. The Bush administration turned around and gave the info to Jerusalem, which sent the jetfighters scrambling to bomb the alleged nuclear site in Syria.

This speculation comes at the website of Stratfor, a subscription global intelligence outfit, whose reports are not always, er, on target. It was picked up at the China Matters blog, where I learned of it.

Nonetheless, the theory goes that North Korea is signaling to the United States, with which it dearly wants to weave a closer diplomatic relationship, that it can provide info of value. After all, North Korea is not entirely desirous of maintaining only one strategic ally, China. It would be more than happy to play China and the United States off each other.

There are many possible holes in this theory. North Korea has few ways to earn hard currency. Why would Pyongyang destroy relations with one of its few remaining customers for military/nuclear technology? What happens if the six-party talks on North Korea?s nuclear program break down again? North Korea will be more penniless than ever.

I accept China Hand's caveats, too, especially that Beijing hopes to keep the US enmeshed in as many relationships, preferably chronically troubled, in order to slowly bleed Washington's resources and soft power. I'm still skeptical the DPRK was doing little more than trading missiles in Syria, too. In the end, the Dayr az-Zwar play might have been little more than an opening maneuver in the current round of Six Party talks.