Left Flank

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

Goldberg also suggests a nuclear fuel bank.

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A lonely voice in the wilderness cries out against hasty decisions.

As the hawkish John Bolton, a former Bush administration official, said this week, Israel may think the best time to attack would be during America's presidential transition—too late to be accused of influencing the election and before needing a new president's green light.

Such an attack would be a mistake. Even if it did not turn the region into a «fireball», as Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world's nuclear watchdog, has predicted, it would certainly provoke retaliation. Given Iran's size and sophistication, it would at best delay rather than end whatever plans the Iranians have to become a nuclear military power. Even if Iran did get the bomb, it would probably not use it for fear of Israel's bigger, existing stockpile. And in the (admittedly improbable) event that Iran is telling the truth when it denies having any such ambition, nothing would change its mind faster than an Israeli strike.

The trouble is, this logic looks different from Tel Aviv. Given their history, a lot of Israelis will run almost any risk to prevent a state that calls repeatedly for their own state's destruction from acquiring the wherewithal to bring that end about. Till now, the world has talked a lot and applied some modest sanctions to stop Iran's dash to enrich uranium. It is time to apply much tougher ones, in the hope that it is not already too late.

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The relationship between each of the Koreas and Japan is like a criminal syndicate. In the end, it's only business.  (via FP Passport's "Morning Brief: Political Thuggery in Zimbabwe")

IAEA found Japan-made parts in N. Korean nuke facility.

But, will Pyongyang ever express its gratitude, or even hold a ceremony?

With the recent disclosures about DPRK-Syria cooperation at al-Kibar, context is a rare commodity, and The Economist delivers.

Judging by its past behaviour, North Korea would do pretty much anything for cash; there are suspicions that it helped the Khan network supply nuclear material to Libya. That said, providing engineers and designs for Syria's reactor may chiefly have been meant to tweak America's nose, says Michael Green, a former Bush administration official now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

The Bush administration and North Korea fell out badly in 2002 over charges that Kim Jong Il's regime had secretly been trying to enrich uranium (also a potential bomb ingredient) while plutonium production was frozen by a previous agreement. The following year North Korea privately threatened to expand its «deterrent», test it (which it later did) and even sell it. With little to export beyond counterfeit currency, drugs and crises, says Mr Green, North Korea used Syria to up the ante—and the expected compensation for later agreeing to desist.

Now America and Mr Kim are negotiating again as part of a six-party deal (also including South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) to tempt him to give up his bombs. Senior American officials last week acknowledged that they had debated whether to try a combination of diplomacy and threats to end the Syrian project. For Israel, however, the Syrian reactor was an existential threat-in-the-making. There was no green light from the United States, the officials said: «none was asked for, none was given.»

Hoping to avoid retaliation, and to head off the risk of a wider Middle East war, Israel wanted the intelligence that led to the bombing kept secret. Worried that wider disclosure would sink the six-party effort too, America briefed only a score of senior members of Congress at the time.

But now the administration needs Congress's support for a controversial deal that could fall significantly short of the prize that the six-party negotiations were supposed to deliver: that, in return for oodles of energy aid and a lifting of some key sanctions, North Korea would first provide a full and accurate accounting of its nuclear past and later dismantle all its nuclear programmes. Instead it has merely declared a rather modest stockpile of plutonium and dug its heels in. Trying to move talks forward, American diplomats have struck a tentative deal that would allow North Korea to «acknowledge» American «concerns» about uranium and proliferation activities, in return for better verification of Yongbyon's plutonium haul. But the backtracking led Congress to demand the facts on Syria first.

George Bush said this week that by going public, America wanted to press North Korea's (notoriously impervious) Kim Jong Il into fuller disclosure, and send a message to proliferators everywhere. But the Syrian pictures may just as easily lead Congress to demand that America adopt a tougher stance in the six-party talks.

Another casualty could be the NPT itself. The IAEA's boss, Mohamed ElBaradei, says inspectors should have been given information about the Syrian reactor sooner by America and Israel. Yet Syria, had it not chosen to deny all, could have claimed that technically it was doing nothing wrong. Building a nuclear reactor is not against NPT rules, unless done with weapons intent—and that is hard, if not impossible, for inspectors to prove, says Henry Sokolski of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington. However, under a 1992 rule accepted by Syria, it should have alerted the IAEA to its reactor plans before construction started. North Korea, Iran and now Syria. The NPT seems there for the breaking.

Firstly, comes NPT reform and a proper way to share intelligence. And then, the US can deal with its armistice with the DPRK. In that order!

Image by peace chicken via Flickr

There has already been much discussion about the remaining mysteries surrounding the Syrian plutonium-generation reactor. My own guess (and it is just a guess) is that the Syrian reactor was the fruit of a three-way partnership composed of Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Iran provided the money, idea, and leadership. Iran ordered Syria to provide the site and some of the labor. North Korea provided the expertise, for which Iran paid (directly or indirectly) in cash.

But where Westhawk is even more helpful is the other half of his post: , the NPT system is broken, so he asks, «What will replace the broken NPT-IAEA system?» I would argue that the system is fundamentally sound, if only nuclear powers with intelligence assets would share information and let the IAEA do its job.

The challenge of proliferation control lies not in the lack of proven techniques but in the absence of moral suasion and sustained diplomacy by the world leaders. The American government subsidized the spread of nuclear knowledge through the Atoms for Peace program to counter Soviet influence, and at virtually every critical juncture since then successive administrations have set aside long-term proliferation goals in favor of short-term strategic priorities. (Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets, and How We Could Have Stopped Him, p. 1844, Palm e-book)

Collins and Frantz advocate the following proposals to fix the system:

• a moratorium on enriched uranium;
• revision of the NPT, including eliminating the right to opt-out and a UN commitment to sanction violators;
• the reduction of nuclear arsenals and a moratorium on the creation of a new generation of weapons;
• restrictions on sales of nuclear technology;
• monitoring of civilian nuclear industries;
• intelligence-sharing

With the exception of sanctions, which are generally a worse remedy than the problems they seek to cure, this is a sane international nuclear policy

By way of responding to Blake Hounshell's comment earlier this week about Albright's and Shire's argument, that "Slowly, but Surely, Pyongyang Is Moving", I have to second DPRK Studies' Richardson's skepticism about DPRK's motivations and the extent of its HEU program. However, there are broader issues that go beyond DPRK, and the arid Clintonian-Neo-Con debates of the early 2000's.

Firstly, there is no hard evidence for ascertaining Pyongyang's HEU program.

The roots of cooperation are deep. North Korea and Pakistan have been engaged in conventional arms trade for over thirty years. In the 1980s, as North Korea began successfully exporting ballistic missiles and technology, Pakistan began producing highly enriched uranium (HEU) at the Khan Research Laboratory. Benazir Bhutto's 1993 visit to Pyongyang seems to have kicked off serious missile cooperation, but it is harder to pinpoint the genesis of Pakistan's nuclear cooperation with North Korea. By the time Pakistan probably needed to pay North Korea for its purchases of medium-range No Dong missiles in the mid-1990s (upon which its Ghauri missiles are based), Pakistan's cash reserves were low. Pakistan could offer North Korea a route to nuclear weapons using HEU that could circumvent the plutonium-focused 1994 Agreed Framework and be difficult to detect.

Here again, the absence of proof leads not to verifiable fact, but a flash of temperament: is one a giddy optimist, or one who keeps his knickers firmly upright? I have to say, I would join the latter group.

Yet, secondly, as that same 2004 Global Security essay concludes, and Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins would concur, the Bush administration is not soft on Pyongyang, it's criminally negligent on nonproliferation. From the 2004 Global Security paper again:

Combating terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, however, are both important objectives for the United States and Congress may consider, in its oversight role, how we can successfully balance both. Pakistan is clearly a key ally in the global war on terror, but the considerable uncertainty about the Pakistani government's involvement in Khan's activities, particularly with respect to North Korea, raises questions about its past, but also future, cooperation in combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

On one hand, according to Frantz and Collins, the CIA could have halted AQ Khan in his tracks as early as the 1970's, but chose to gather intelligence, rather than share information with the Dutch intelligence services or law enforcement. Both before and after 9/11, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf resented his divided obligations, to protect Khan and, perhaps, the ISI and his own military colleagues from further questioning about his nuclear network's activities, and to the United States for military aid conditional upon backing the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. President Clinton shelved prosecuting Khan, for Pakistan's participation in a commando raid on al-Qaeda in 1998. In July, 2001, the Bush administration had another opportunity to stop Khan. Finally, in December, 2001, George Tenet visited Islamabad personally, but not to ascertain Khan's activities, rather to secure the arrest of two Pakistani generals alleged to have negotiated with al-Qaeda for nuclear materials. Tenet studiously avoided mention of Khan so as not to embarrass Musharraf. American presidents from Eisenhower to Carter to Bush have routinely subordinated the strategic question of halting proliferation to the exigencies of the day.

Thirdly, there's the Libya gambit:

There is a superficially plausible model - Libya. Disarm, don't worry about a U.S. attack, and enjoy normalized relations, etc. But that doesn't take into account the cult of personality surrounding the Kims, and thus the need to maintain isolation.

Libya's capitulation is the result of decades of comprehensive sanctions and the intelligence on the AQ Khan nuclear network the CIA decided it could reliably turn over. However, such a wealth of intelligence on the DPRK doesn't seem to exist, and sanctions against Pyongyang have proven unsuccessful.

Finally, there's the "Beijing Miracle", the view that PRC will apply the requisite diplomatic, and if not successful, economic and military, pressure on Pyongyang to see the Six-Party process through to finish. That feeble hope died, if it ever really did have legs, when Beijing advised calm over Pyongyong's missed deadline. Beijing is simply more competent than Washington's elected politicians at crafting and sticking to a foreign policy agenda.

And, that's where the problem lies. It's the incremental errors in successive administrations' foreign policies, from Atoms for Peace, to the Brzezinski response to the Soviet-Afghan War, and finally to the Clinton and Bush administration's support for Pakistan at any cost. It's the marginalization of the International Atomic Energy Agency because of half-baked fears of international organizations (and simple tight-fistedness). It's the incestuous need to support certain states, due to previous errors in policy, but instead calling it "friendship". It might even be the simple-minded belief that nukes don't kill, only bad guys in authoritarian states do. It's the result of a well-meaning, yet hypocritical hegemon losing track of its global responsibilities due to interest-group lobbying, error, and bad intelligence, instead of committing itself to limited, well-articulated, universal goals, like non-proliferation, globalization, and sharing resources equitably.

DPRK has played the seam between all these mistakes. The only way to beat Pyongyang is to undo the major damage decades of minor errors have wrought.

It's the nuke deal that will never die! 

So, the deal may not pass. But a paradox of the current mess is that few doubt that it※perhaps rejigged a bit※will be passed eventually. The task may fall to future governments in Delhi and Washington. If so, the terms can only get worse for India.

Although I prefer multilateral solutions in this case, Indian Communists' absolute intransigence on the 123 Agreement seems petty, and merely the worst sort of populist anti-Americanism. But, if India's government could get the IAEA's and the Nuclear Suppliers Group's approval for the bilateral deal to pass in both legislatures, why not just join the NPT?