On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Steven Hertzberg wrote:
> I understand some Lawmakers are complaining that the administration
> waited 2-weeks to disclose the information about N. Korea
Actually it's worse than that -- the most important information is 10 years old and is only being repackaged with a little new gloss.
There are two parts to North Korea's nuclear program. The most important part, the part that led to bombs if they have them, is the plutonium-based program. But all the plutonium they own was extracted before the 1994 agreement. The whole point of that agreement was to shut down those reactors (which are impossible to hide) and replace them with light-water reactors which don't produce plutonium and which can be closely monitored. (Fwiw, pretty much the same kind of reactors that we're so cheesed Russia has agreed to supply to Iran.) And this was not a subtle revelation at the time. If you think back you'll vaguely remember that it almost sounded like we were considering war for a couple of months in 1994.
It was estimated shortly afterwards that NK had extracted approx. 14kg of plutonium from the reactors before they were shut down, and that this was enough plutonium to produced "at least one, and possibly two, nuclear weapons" according to intelligence reports that have since been declassified. Rumsfeld's recent higher guess of 5 to 6 seems to rest entirely on the supposition that its technology might have advanced to the point where it could make bombs based on 3 kg of plutonium per.
Now part of the 1994 agreement was that North Korea would make no new efforts to obtain more nuclear material (which is the key and usually decisive obstacle to smaller countries getting bombs). And the revelation that has just been made is tha they have confirmed that they have had a program to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU), an alternative bomb fuel, one that can be made more secretively than plutonium. (It is, however, a hugely complicated process that has baffled most countries that have tried it. It is the main method attributed to both Iraq and Brazil, who have had lots of problems with it.) This was originally reported in 2000 in the Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper. They reported then that a defector to China had revealed the existence of a uranium enrichment facility in the north-west of NK at a site called Mount Chonma. We seem to now have confirmed this report independently using intelligence sources, showed our evidence to the Koreans when Kelley was there, and been surprised to have them confirm it openly.
This is a clear violation of the 1994 agreement. But we have to distinguish between a new violation and a new threat. The defector's report was that the site had been producing HEU since 1989 at a rate of 1.3 grams a day. That's 1/2 a kg a year. You need 50 kg to produce a uranium-based nuclear weapon.
As for the Pakistan aid, that is also an old speculation that is also no secret. Pakistan's bomb is based on HEU, and it was suspected under the Clinton regime that Pakistan had traded HEU technology in exchange for missile technology.
But so far, there has been no confirmation that Korea got any better at that technology. Rumsfeld has given no indication that he thinks they made any uranium-based bombs out of it. And there is no reason Pakistan should have had any relevant expertise to offer on the question of making plutonium bombs with less plutonium per.
The news is flooded with articles on this right now, but here's one that contains most of the facts I've cited:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?G1DC63E22
Michael