Left Flank

It might be wishful thinking, but when Pyongyang is involved, that luxury can turn to disappointment.

The two-pronged approach grew out of an agreement reached by Pyongyang and Washington in Singapore on April 8. Unlike the North’s production of plutonium, whose existence is acknowledged by both the North and the United States, the two countries differ on the existence of highly-enriched uranium being produced by the North and the North’s proliferation activities.

The establishment of a system for monitoring the North’s activities, in particular, seems to be a strategic attempt to ease tensions via diplomatic compromise and block nuclear activity by North Korea in the future, rather than a resolution of the nuclear issue that continues to focus on past activities.

ACW's James Acton acknowledges this, and is not taking sides. Which, BTW,is what the members of the Six-Party process should remember.

Matthew Yglesias offers another NPT birthday wish (via UN Dispatch: «Happy 40th, NPT»):

Goldberg also suggests a nuclear fuel bank.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Nukes of Hazard's Eli Lewine summarizes the week in DPRK nukes with depressing undertones.

Confidence in the Six Party Process continues to be lost each passing day. Once the important question of what to do with the spent fuel from the disabled reactor at Yongbyon is answered, there will be very little left to point to as representing continuing cooperation. Taking up the plutonium issue at this juncture, and designing and implementing an initial verification process, would kill two birds with one stone. North Korea would have an avenue by which it could continue to show it is cooperating with the Six Parties and we could begin to get answers to the most important questions we have about the North Korean nuclear program.

This all seems even more vital given the dismal state of planning towards how we are going to verify the North Korean declaration.

Yet, Lewine leaves out some of the background events, that together lead me (again) to debate, why even bother? It happens to the best of us.

There's the DPRK-Syria missile pipeline. This football has been kicked around for months now, and even Paul Richter at the LA Times can't bring home a conclusion.

Western governments have concluded that Syria and North Korea were collaborating on a nuclear weapons program at a mysterious site in the Syrian desert that was bombed by Israel last year, a senior European diplomat said Wednesday in a rare comment about the episode by a high-ranking official.

>The diplomat said that after a review of available intelligence, Western governments have reached "some sort of common ground . . . that there seems to have been cooperation between Syria and North Korea" at the site. The official's remarks were made on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject

If I could have argued something so weak, and not put my name to it, college and grad school would have been a breeze. I hope this guy was elected, and not a lifer in some ministry. Oh well, move on!

Nothing amuses more than the continuing antics (politely called a 'debate') within the Bush administration.

In a public departure from administration policy, Jay Lefkowitz, a conservative lawyer who is Bush's envoy on North Korean human rights, said this week the North would likely "remain in its present nuclear status" when the next president took over in January 2009.

"North Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner," Lefkowitz told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "We should consider a new approach to North Korea."

At issue is a declaration that North Korea was supposed to make by the end of last year formally stating everything in its nuclear inventory. When the North missed that deadline, administration officials initially sought to minimize the significance of the lapse, but they have expressed increasing concern in the wake of a North Korean statement on Jan. 4, in which the North insisted that it had already disclosed everything that it needed to.

The North has cited a list of nuclear programs that it provided in November, but the United States has rejected the list as incomplete.

"Some people make the argument that we're just pursuing a policy of talks that go nowhere," said one administration official with knowledge of the debate within the administration.

That last part might be the administration's epitaph: "policies that go nowhere". Arthur Waldron has a good grasp on the significance of policy drift.

In the fifteen years wasted by these negotiations, North Korea has presumably perfected her nuclear capability. Our close allies the Japanese have, meanwhile, been angered by the American willingness to sacrifice Japanese concerns–about their citizens who have been abducted by Pyongyang—in order not to upset imaginary progress being made in the talks. What are the lessons? First, you cannot negotiate away nuclear capabilities. Second, military options do not really exist. Finally, and most worryingly, the very process of negotiation gives us a stake in the survival of the regime with which we are engaging. We're becoming ever more committed to the survival of the regime that we originally identified as the problem.

Soon I expect we will be hearing calls for the U.S. to help stabilize North Korea after Kim Jong Il, even in the absence of that country's abandonment of nuclear weapons.

Proliferation and developing both plutonium and enriched uranium programs are hallmarks of the strategy Pakistan patented in the 70s and 80s. At that time it was Iran and Iraq which received Pakistani help. Now, Pyongyang is just riffing on that old tune.

I've read about four chapters of The Nuclear Jihadist, mostly about A.Q. Khan's early life in India, Pakistan, and Europe. The author spices the tale of Khan's remarkable turn from the charming man with a Dutch wife to a patriotic Pakistani spy with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's nuclear ambitions, Pakistan's early attempts to manufacture a plutonium-based nuclear device, and Khan's early work on centrifuges used for uranium enrichment.

Not only did Khan keep copies of his own work, but, after contacting Pakistani intelligence, he acquired access to other projects vital to Pakistan's uranium program. Khan also ordered equipment identical in specification to equipment he himself developed for Dutch laboratories, which tipped off Dutch authorities. Before that, no one suspected that Khan was spying, and security conditions were negligent. A Dutch friend, who had tutored Khan on photography (which Khan used to copy documents, along with his ability to translate Dutch and German into Urdu), failed to intervene earlier, because he wanted to retain Khan's friendship. But, finally, in 1975, on the eve of Khan's final departure for Pakistan (of which no one knew), there was a real opportunity to stop him.

In 1975, the Dutch national security agency, BVD, and FDO, a Dutch company where A.Q. Khan worked on centrifuges, sought his arrest for espionage.  Then economics minister (later, prime minister), Ruud Lubbers, did not want to undermine the reputation of burgeoning Dutch companies with a scandal. Enter the CIA:

Lubbers and a former CIA division chief who monitored the Pakistani nuclear program at the time said the solution met the Dutch goal of maintaining the economic status quo and satisfying the Americans. In fact, the CIA was exultant because the Khan episode opened a new window onto Pakistan's procurement operation at a critical moment. A few weeks earlier, a Pakistani nuclear scientist who had been providing the CIA with intelligence from inside the [Pakistan Atomic Energy Comission] PAEC had been exposed and arrested. The CIA feared that its spotlight on Pakistani nuclear work would go dark at a critical moment. Said the former CIA official, "We were nervous about rebuilding our espionage networks, so it makes sense that the agency would not have asked the Dutch to arrest Khan. We were rebuilding, and we would have wanted to see a lot more."

The decision to recommend against arresting Khan marked the first time that American intelligence agencies could have stopped Khan. The decision was understandable in light of the agency's culture and worldview - the CIA is not a law enforcement agency, and its responsibility is to gather intelligence and pass it on the American policymakers. Looking back, however, current and former proliferation experts and intelligence officers questioned the decision. What if Khan had been stopped before he really got started? He had kept the centrifuge designs to himself to ensure a triumphal return, and his arrest would almost certainly have stopped the transfer of key information to Pakistan and delayed its nuclear program for years, perhaps decades.