Has any evidence been put forward for the contention that Pakistan helped North Korea with its uranium enrichment program? That Korea sold *Pakistan* missile technology makes perfect sense. Pakistan clearly wanted better missiles and everyone knows the North Koreans have launched two-stage missiles. And what they would get in return also seems simple. NK is in dire need of money.
But I don't see why NK would need help with its plutonium enrichment program if it's been going since 1989. And more to the point, I don't see any reason to think Pakistan would be able to supply any if it did. Pakistan's atomic bomb program is plutonium based, just like the one that was stopped in NK under the Basic Understanding in 1994. So there's no reason why it would know any more about the matter than NK. And there's considerable reason why it would know less, since it doesn't need it. Pakistan never signed a Basic Understanding; it's still using plutonium. If NK wanted expertise on uranium enrichment, they should have talked to the Brazilians.
So on its face, this looks on a par with the Saddam loves al-Qaeda assertions, completely nonsensical, but getting weight through the magic of pure repetition. If anyone ever comes across any evidence to the contrary, I'd be very grateful if they could post it.
I also have a second question. The CIA asserts in the same testimony than the North's uranium enrichment program would produce enough material to produce weapons in 2 to 3 years. The only detailed information I've seen, which all seems to come down to a single NK defector who gave a detailed interview to a Japanese paper in 2000, said that the plant in question was producing 1.3 grams a day, or roughly half a kilogram a year. It takes 25 kilograms to make a bomb out of enriched uranium. The plant was supposed to have been in existence since 1989, but that's still an ETA of 19 years for a single weapon that could not be tested.
The way this administration keeps going on about 5 bombs, 6 bombs, no bombs, they already have them, they'll have them any moment, reminds me of that wonderful exchange in the Manchurian Candidate. The Joe McCarthy character is asking his wife, Angela Lansbury, the real brains behind the operation, why she can't give him a single number about how many communists there are in the State Department. The way she making him change it, it makes him look like an idiot, he says. The guys in the cloakroom are begining to tease him. And she says Don't you understand? By saying a different number every time, we get people to argue over the numbers. They're all asking how many communists are in the state department. Nobody's asking whether there are communists in the State Department. And he buckles under but still looks glum as he squirts catchup on his eggs. And she apologizes for being dictatorial and says soothingly Would it really make you happy if we stuck to one number you could remember? And his face lights up and she looks down and the camera does a reverse shot close-up of the bottle of Heinz. And in the next scene he stands on the Senate floor brandishing a piece of paper and says "There are exactly 57 communists in the State Department..."
New York Times November 24, 2002
In North Korea and Pakistan, Deep Roots of Nuclear Barter
By DAVID E. SANGER
S EOUL, South Korea, Nov. 21 Last July, American intelligence agencies
tracked a Pakistani cargo aircraft as it landed at a North Korean
airfield and took on a secret payload: ballistic missile parts, the
chief export of North Korea's military.
The shipment was brazen enough, in full view of American spy
satellites. But intelligence officials who described the incident say
even the mode of transport seemed a subtle slap at Washington: the
Pakistani plane was an American-built C-130.
It was part of the military force that President Pervez Musharraf had
told President Bush last year would be devoted to hunting down the
terrorists of Al Qaeda, one reason the administration was hailing its
new cooperation with a country that only a year before it had labeled
a rogue state.
But several times since that new alliance was cemented, American
intelligence agencies watched silently as Pakistan's air fleet
conducted a deadly barter with North Korea. In transactions
intelligence agencies are still unraveling, the North provided General
Musharraf with missile parts he needs to build a nuclear arsenal
capable of reaching every strategic site in India.
In a perfect marriage of interests, Pakistan provided the North with
many of the designs for gas centrifuges and much of the machinery it
needs to make highly enriched uranium for the country's latest nuclear
weapons project, one intended to put at risk South Korea, Japan and
100,000 American troops in Northeast Asia.
The Central Intelligence Agency told members of Congress this week
that North Korea's uranium enrichment program, which it discovered
only this summer, will produce enough material to produce weapons in
two to three years. Previously it has estimated that North Korea
probably extracted enough plutonium from a nuclear reactor to build
one or two weapons, until that program was halted in 1994 in a
confrontation with the United States.
<snip>
Rest: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/international/asia/24KORE.html