Syria Could Trip up North Korean Nuclear Deal

Suspicions that North Korea provided support for a Syrian nuclear program could trip up multilateral efforts to dismantle Pyongyang’s own atomic infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reported today (see GSN, Feb. 7).

The denuclearization process faltered after North Korea missed a Dec. 31 deadline to fully declare its past and present nuclear programs.  However, U.S. officials believe that Pyongyang will ultimately prove willing to provide details in two crucial areas — the size of its nuclear arsenal and a suspected uranium enrichment area.

“The Syria issue is where we really need to push,” said one U.S. official.  “It’s the one where we haven’t made any headway.”

North Korea has rejected claims that it has provided nuclear support for Damascus.  However, satellite images show North Korean workers at a Syrian facility that was destroyed in a September Israeli air raid, according to U.S. and European officials.

There has been significant debate since the attack on whether the plant near the Euphrates River was an unfinished nuclear facility (see GSN, Feb. 5).

Based on intelligence regarding the air strike, Western governments reached “some sort of common ground … that there seems to have been [nuclear] cooperation between Syria and North Korea,” a high-level European diplomat told the Journal.

It would be difficult, though, to determine the level of North Korean involvement in Syria, U.S. officials said.  The tight hold on information regarding the Israeli attack leaves the six-party talks nations divided on the specific admission expected from North Korea.

“Some actors believe that what’s been disclosed (about Syria) is serious and it’s nuclear.  But it’s not universally accepted,” the U.S. official said (Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8).

North Korea said today that “hard-line conservative forces in the U.S.” were ratcheting up pressure in the nuclear standoff, the Associated Press reported.  It warned against such a move.

“As shown in the previous nuclear [crises] on the Korean Peninsula, pursuing a policy of force would only bring about an explosive crisis, not a resolution of the problem,” the official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary.

“Everything achieved through dialogue so far would evaporate into the air,” it added (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Feb. 8).

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