U.S. Lowers Confidence in North Korean HEU Program

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — U.S. confidence that North Korea was working toward a production-scale uranium enrichment program has slipped, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 27).

When the United States confronted Pyongyang in 2002 with evidence it believed showed North Korea was pursuing a large-scale enrichment facility, U.S. officials had “high confidence” in the assessment, according to Joseph DeTrani, North Korea mission manager for the national intelligence director.

“We still see elements of that program,” he said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but described the U.S. belief now in the “mid-confidence level.”

The U.S. assertion that North Korea was working toward uranium enrichment while its plutonium-based nuclear program was frozen led to a quick collapse of the Clinton-era Agreed Framework and the restart of plutonium production.  The United States claims Pyongyang acknowledged possessing an enrichment program during that confrontation, but North Korean officials have publicly denied making any such admission.

During the negotiations that led to the Feb. 13 denuclearization plan, State Department officials have said North Korea did not acknowledge any work toward a uranium-based program.

DeTrani, however, said the recent six-party agreement covers all nuclear programs (see GSN, Feb. 15).  “The North Koreans are very aware of when we speak on all nuclear programs, we are also including their acquisitions of materials for a production-scale uranium enrichment program,” he said.

That mention of the uranium allegations has been largely absent from discussions of North Korea’s current program might indicate that the United States has altered its assessment, Joel Wit, a former State Department official involved in negotiating the Agreed Framework, wrote in a recent article.

Wit and Institute for Science and International Security head David Albright, who both recently returned from Pyongyang, have suggested it might be time to reconsider the 2002 assertion (see GSN, Feb. 22).  The United States had initially believed that North Korea was going to be producing highly enriched uranium by the middle of this decade, Wit said recently, calling it a deeply flawed assessment.

Since his return from North Korea, Albright has said he believes that international inspectors would eventually discover parts of a North Korean uranium program but that it would not be on the scale that the United States had originally suggested.

During yesterday’s lengthy and wide-ranging hearing on threats to U.S. national security, new National Intelligence Director John McConnell and Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, both listed global terrorism as the main concern, followed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

“Increased availability of information together with technical advances have the potential to allow additional countries to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,” Maples said.  “And this is an area of increasing concern.”

Both McConnell and Maples expressed no doubt that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon.  Iran maintains that its research into the nuclear fuel cycle and enrichment technology is for peaceful energy-production purposes.

When pressed by Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), McConnell said it is unlikely Iran could field a nuclear weapon before 2015 and that it could take even longer before it had a missile capable of delivering a nuclear payload.

Maples said the Defense Intelligence Agency continues to believe Iran is developing an ICBM, suggesting 2015 as a completion date (see GSN, Feb. 26).  “They’re investing very heavily in ballistic missile capabilities that pose a regional threat,” he said.  “A capability to reach Israel is well within their means.”

Strong economic sanctions levied on Iran “would have a dramatic impact,” McConnell said, but he suggested it remains unclear if such penalties would force the government in Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

In responding to a series of quick-fire questions from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), McConnell agreed that a nuclear-armed Iran would be “one of the most destabilizing events in modern times” and could spark an atomic arms race in the Middle East.

Maples said he believes North Korea, which detonated a nuclear device in October (see GSN, Oct. 10, 2006), has the technical capability to send a ballistic missile as far as California.  It has not yet been successfully tested, he said.

North Korea unsuccessfully tested its intercontinental Taepodong 2 missile in July 2006 (see GSN, July 5, 2006).

It is unclear whether North Korea is capable of arming such a missile with a nuclear warhead, but some experts believe Pyongyang has the capability to marry a nuclear device to its shorter-range Nodong missiles.

“I would probably estimate that it’s not a matter of years, that in fact they will have learned form the Taepodong launch of last summer and gone back to make corrections to whatever the failure was and apply that to the missile systems they already have,” Maples said.

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