A senior U.S. official last week talked by telephone with a North Korean representative to the United Nations, shortly after Pyongyang’s announcement that it had removed 8,000 plutonium-bearing fuel rods from its Yongbyon reactor, Agence France-Presse reported today (see GSN, May 13). No immediate results were seen from the reported contact between the U.S. official and Deputy Ambassador Han Song Ryol, according to AFP. It was the first direct contact between the two nations since December (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, May 16). South Korean officials in talks today promised North Korea a new “substantial proposal” if Pyongyang resumes multilateral negotiations, the Associated Press reported. “If the six-party talks resume, it shouldn’t be talks for the sake of talks, but substantial progress is necessary,” said Vice Unification Minister Rhee Bong-jo, who led the South Korean delegation. “For this, the South side is preparing for a substantial proposal and will propose it to the related countries when the talks resume.” Rhee said North Korean officials listened without comment as he made the entreaty. Washington and Tokyo, however, simultaneously warned of unspecified repercussions if Pyongyang carried out a nuclear test (Soo-Jeong Lee, Associated Press/Rapid City Journal, May 16). “Action would have to be taken,” U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley told CNN’s Late Edition yesterday. The warning represented Washington’s first effort at drawing a “red line” that would mandate a reaction if crossed, the New York Times reported today. “The Japanese are out today already saying that those steps would need to include going to the Security Council and, potentially, sanctions,” Hadley said, referring to comments by Shinzo Abe, the secretary general of Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party. “If North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons becomes definite” and North Korea “conducts nuclear testing, for instance, Japan will naturally bring the issue to the U.N. and call for sanctions against North Korea,” Abe said. Abe added that it was “unthinkable not to impose any sanctions in case of a nuclear testing” (David Sanger, New York Times, May 16). U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill was cautious about the possibility of a breakthrough resulting from today’s talks between Pyongyang and Seoul, AFP reported (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, May 16). Elsewhere, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing on Friday discussed a Japanese plan for talks among five nations involved in the stalled six-party talks, AFP reported. The two talked about “how to continue to encourage North Korea to come back to the talks and deal seriously with these issues,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, May 13).
By James Kitfield, National Journal
UNITED NATIONS — They came from 188 sovereign nations, gathering on May Day for a monthlong conference that is equal parts arms control summit and Manhattan street fair. Each day, delegates assemble in the United Nations’ cavernous General Assembly hall and patiently await their allotted 10 minutes at the lectern to share their country’s view of the evolving relationship between nuclear weapons and international prestige and power (see GSN, May 13). On one recent day at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference, a group calling itself Mayors for Peace gathered outside a U.N. meeting room, while another room attracted Japanese atomic bomb survivors wearing T-shirts proclaiming “No Nukes, No Wars.” At the outset of the conference, an estimated 40,000 marchers advocating nuclear disarmament formed themselves into the shape of a giant peace symbol in Central Park. Remarkably, their seemingly utopian dream is exactly what is enshrined as the goal of the treaty the world had come to review. The NPT review conference, in short, has shaped up as exactly the kind of multilateral forum and debating society that is anathema to the Bush administration. Determined to preserve all of its military options in the struggle against global terrorists and rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction, the administration has sent only a midlevel delegation to the NPT conference. American officials realize that the meeting is likely to end in impasse, acrimony, and an increasingly shaky status quo. Even while the U.S. delegation has sounded the alarm about recent provocations and possible nuclear breakout by Iran and North Korea, for instance, many other countries have spent their allotted 10 minutes criticizing the United States for adopting a doctrine of pre-emptive war and for seeking to develop new nuclear weapons. Behind the recriminations and mirthful demonstrations, virtually everyone concedes the deadly seriousness of the issues at stake. For more than a year, President George W. Bush and his top national security advisers have pointed out the growing structural weaknesses and dangerous loopholes in the nonproliferation treaty. The pact is generally acknowledged to lack adequate verification and inspection measures to catch cheaters; moreover, it also lacks sanctions to punish scofflaws and the nations that simply withdraw from the treaty when their violations are revealed. And, pointing out the treaty’s worst weakness of all, Bush administration officials cite North Korea and Iran as prime examples of how current interpretations allow nations to mask and advance nuclear weapons ambitions under the guise of civilian nuclear-power programs. “We cannot allow rogue states that violate their commitments and defy the international community to undermine the NPT’s fundamental role in strengthening international security,” Bush said on March 7. “We must, therefore, close the loopholes that allow states to produce nuclear materials that can be used to build bombs under the cover of civilian nuclear programs.” Anyone expecting the U.S. delegation to mount a full-court press at the conference to significantly plug those loopholes in the NPT, however, has been sorely disappointed. At the contentious 2000 NPT review conference, non-nuclear states laid out the kind of quid pro quo they would demand as part of any such negotiation; that conference ended with agreement on a series of benchmarks that became known as the “13 steps.” The steps would require the Bush administration to embrace an Antiballistic Missile Treaty that it has already scuttled; affirm a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that it publicly rejects; and diminish the role of nuclear weapons in a way that is difficult to square with the administration’s desire to pursue new nuclear “bunker-buster” weapons. “We do think the NPT is critical to one of our top foreign-policy priorities, which is to confront North Korea and Iran and force them to abide by the obligations spelled out in the treaty,” said a senior State Department official. “We’re not proposing to conferees, however, that the NPT should be amended or rewritten. Developing new nuclear weapons is also something that the acknowledged nuclear states have done throughout the history of the treaty, so we do not accept this notion that the United States must take steps to ‘devalue’ nuclear weapons to be in compliance. That’s a flawed reading of our obligations. After all, we’re a nuclear weapons state, and the treaty recognizes that.” Rather than engaging in an acrimonious debate about U.S. obligations to disarm under the treaty, the Bush administration points to its signing of the 2002 Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions, also known as the Moscow Treaty, which calls for significant reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals. And the administration says it will try to strengthen the nonproliferation regime by other means. For example, it wants the Nuclear Suppliers Group — the 40 nations that produce nuclear materials and equipment — to adopt stricter export controls. The White House also backs calls by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. entity that polices the treaty, for unanimous adoption of the Additional Protocol” that would give inspectors the right to conduct no-warning “challenge inspections” of nuclear facilities. From the outset, however, the Bush administration has focused more on countermeasures to the nuclear threat, including construction of a U.S. national missile defense system. It has also called on other nations to participate in a Proliferation Security Initiative, a voluntary effort designed to interdict illegal nuclear materials in transit. And beginning after Sept. 11, the Bush administration has threatened to wage pre-emptive war and to force regime change in rogue states that have weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorists — its famous “axis of evil,” Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Non-nuclear states, however, widely view the Bush administration’s unwillingness to spend political capital or to take the lead in reinforcing a sagging nonproliferation treaty as another sign that the nuclear powers have come to see the treaty as just a convenient way to keep the club relatively exclusive. Already, the broad consensus at the core of the treaty is splintering under numerous assaults, from treaty outliers including India, Pakistan, and Israel, to probable cheaters such as North Korea and Iran. Many arms control experts believe that if that trend continues, the entire nonproliferation regime will come crumbling down. “If North Korea and Iran were to cross the ‘nuclear red line,’ then others will surely follow, and I fear the nonproliferation regime — with the NPT as its centerpiece — will unravel very quickly,” said Graham Allison, a former dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. “At that point, it’s much easier to imagine terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons that would allow them to kill at their maximum capacity, which will probably exceed what the civilized world can endure,” Allison said at a recent conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Joseph Cirincione is the longtime arms control expert and director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. He says that if North Korea and Iran surmount the treaty’s barriers, and if India and Pakistan continue to make end runs by expanding their nuclear arsenals without sanction or international oversight, then regional rivals and other emerging powers will almost certainly follow suit, resulting in a “chain reaction” of nuclear proliferation. “I think we’re at a tipping point,” Cirincione said. “The next two or three years will likely decide whether we continue on the road to a world with fewer and fewer nuclear weapons — or else, tip the other way and enter the nuclear nightmare once envisioned by John F. Kennedy, a nightmare world that the NPT was designed specifically to avoid.” A Grand BargainWhen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970, Richard Nixon was president, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a nuclear arms race that threatened to bring on Armageddon, and the spectacle of gargantuan thermonuclear mushroom clouds billowing to the heavens and lifting thousands of tons of radioactive debris into the Earth’s atmosphere during test explosions was fresh in living memory. So too was the nuclear brinkmanship of the 1963 Cuban missile crisis. It was after that ordeal that President Kennedy famously despaired over the Atomic Age that was rapidly dawning. At that time, the experts surmised that some 15 to 20 nations would likely cross the nuclear threshold by the end of the 1960s. “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world,” Kennedy warned. “There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament.” The power of Kennedy’s vision, and the specter of nuclear warheads thousands of times more destructive than even the devastating bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, helped to forge a nearly unprecedented international consensus. The treaty became the foundation of the nuclear nonproliferation regime precisely because it eschewed the hundreds of pages of often-indecipherable minutiae on missile throw-weights and blast radii typical of arms control treaties. Instead, it expressed a simple principle — that nuclear weapons were a threat to humankind and thus an inherently negative force — and it proposed a grand bargain to first limit them and then reduce them, ultimately to the point of extinction. In exchange for a pledge by the five original nuclear states — the United States, Russia, France, Britain, and China — to eliminate their nuclear stockpiles on some indeterminate timetable, and to share civilian nuclear energy technology, 183 other nations eventually agreed to forgo nuclear weapons altogether. While the idea of putting the nuclear genie all the way back in its bottle may sound utopian, even experts concede that, absent the underlying principle expressed in the treaty, the world community would possess no norms against nuclear proliferation, no standards by which IAEA inspectors could judge the safety and security of nuclear activities undertaken by its members, and no basis in international law for pressuring nuclear rogues. “I think if you look at what has happened since the NPT went into force, it has made a huge difference in terms of limiting the number of nuclear weapons states, and giving us confidence — and some very important tools — in terms of controlling nuclear proliferation,” said Sara Scott, the head of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. “So while we may need to strengthen the NPT in order to better deal with potential cheaters, you certainly wouldn’t want to give up on the treaty.” Preserving the DealOver the decades, the Cold War superpowers demonstrated their fealty to the pact’s grand bargain largely through a series of arms control treaties that curtailed nuclear tests and attempted to check, and eventually roll back, the nuclear arms race. Even before the treaty came into force, for instance, Kennedy secured the multilateral Limited Test Ban Treaty that ended aboveground nuclear tests. President Lyndon Johnson then successfully negotiated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty itself. President Nixon signed the treaty, and he negotiated the bilateral Strategic Arms Limitation Talks — known as SALT I — and Antiballistic Missile treaties with the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan negotiated and signed the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, eliminating a whole class of missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. President George H.W. Bush negotiated the sweeping START II treaty under which the United States and the Soviet Union pledged to reduce their strategic nuclear arsenals, and the U.S. unilaterally withdrew most of the tactical nuclear weapons it had deployed around the world. President Bill Clinton crafted the “Agreed Framework” to freeze North Korea’s nuclear program, and in 1995, managed the strengthening and indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That nonproliferation regime actually reached its zenith at the end of the Cold War. The superpower adversaries still had vast nuclear arsenals, but they were preparing major reductions. A handful of nations had pursued clandestine nuclear programs in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or had refused to join the treaty, but they were very much the exception to the nonproliferation norm. In the mid-1990s, three states of the former Soviet Union — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — actually relinquished their nuclear weapons and signed on to the nonproliferation treaty. Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa also abandoned their nuclear weapons programs. Rather than the 15 to 20 nuclear weapons states that Kennedy had feared the world would see by the end of the 1960s, at the end of the Cold War, there were only six — the original five plus Israel, with its undeclared but widely acknowledged arsenal. “There is still room for optimism when you consider that there are more countries that started nuclear weapons programs and then gave them up than there are nuclear weapons states,” said Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Project on Managing the Atom. “I think if the United States were to change its approach substantially, it could stem this present tide of proliferation so that 15 years from now, we’re still only talking about eight or nine nuclear states. However, if we don’t take the necessary actions, and Iran and North Korea become nuclear powers, I do believe we’ll see a cascade of nuclear proliferation to many more states, and potentially, to terror groups.” The Tide ReversesThe historic tide of nuclear disarmament hit a low point in 1998, when India and Pakistan — the only nations besides Israel that had refused to sign the treaty — breached the nonproliferation firewall by conducting nuclear tests. Those underground detonations not only raised the very real possibility of nuclear war on the Indian subcontinent, but also posed profound proliferation concerns because both nations were outside the international system of safeguards and export controls. Other rumblings soon followed. In that same year, Saddam Hussein kicked U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, and North Korea tested a long-range missile over Japan. Suspicions grew that Iran was conducting a clandestine nuclear program, and Congress produced an alarming report about nuclear espionage by China. In 1999, the Republican-controlled Senate rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, reversing decades of arms control precedent. The Bush administration also turned its back on the nonproliferation regime, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty in order to build a national missile defense system. At the cusp of the 21st century, the nuclear nonproliferation movement had lost its momentum, and the world had lost its confidence in nuclear disarmament. In that moment of vulnerability for the nonproliferation regime, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the resulting Bush doctrine that threatened pre-emptive war against rogue nations further destabilized the international order. More and more nations began to question the grand bargain at the core of the treaty. In that sense, the accusations of cheating and bad faith between the nuclear “haves” and “have-nots” at the NPT review conference are masking a greater truth that neither side wants to confront publicly. In a world in which the nuclear ambitions of determined rogue nations are increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to counter, and in which a pre-empting superpower is not easily deterred by conventional means, possessing nuclear weapons may actually make strategic sense to many national leaders. When states seem to garner a greater measure of international prestige than opprobrium by going nuclear, nations may well start learning anew to love the bomb. “That’s what worries me the most: The incentives to acquire nuclear weapons are growing rapidly, while the benefits of abstaining from nuclear weapons are declining,” said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Both Pakistan and India, for instance, have better relations with the United States today than before they tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Now, put yourself in the shoes of a decision maker in Iran, or North Korea, or Japan, or Turkey, or Egypt. You might give a lot of thought to the idea that nuclear weapons could help guarantee your security.” To understand the implications for the United States if that logic gathers momentum and the world reaches the proliferation tipping point, walk a moment in the shoes of diplomats and experts who have confronted exactly what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in the hands of countries great and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible. Ask yourself how easily you would rest seeing what they’ve seen and knowing what they know. Most Dangerous NationArriving on Oct. 6, 2003, at the Pakistani president’s official residence, Army House, in Rawalpindi, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage stepped onto familiar, if perilous, ground. Archterrorist Osama bin Laden was almost certainly still based somewhere in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions, and the tentacles of Islamic extremism were known to stretch deep into Pakistan’s security and intelligence services — perhaps even as deep as Army House, which also serves as the headquarters for the Pakistani military. Certainly, the man he was there to meet, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had been targeted with death threats. And for the third time in as many years, Armitage was descending on Musharraf like a storm crow at a moment of existential crisis. He was there to present the Pakistani general with yet another stark and unpleasant choice. The first time that Armitage dealt with Pakistanis in a moment of crisis was in the days immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. At that time, he carried an ultimatum. The fundamentalist Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan and offered sanctuary to al-Qaeda was a beneficiary of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of the ISI, was a known friend of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and a public admirer of bin Laden. The unwelcome message Armitage delivered was that Pakistan must choose whether to be with the United States in the war shortly to come to the region, or against it. Caught between the vengeful superpower and the practically medieval Taliban, Musharraf had little choice. The Pakistani general sided with the United States, knowing full well that by doing so he would incur the wrath of powerful Islamic extremist factions in his own country. Three months later, toward the end of 2001, India’s parliament building came under a terrorist attack, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistani extremists. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were facing off along the India-Pakistan border, and the two nations sat on the brink of war. The longtime antagonists had already fought three wars since gaining their independence from Britain half a century before. The difference in 2001 was that both nations had successfully tested nuclear weapons three years earlier. U.S. weapons experts estimated that a nuclear exchange between the two populous nations might kill as many as 30 million people, a humanitarian catastrophe of almost unimaginable dimensions. U.S. intelligence experts, concluding that Pakistan would inevitably lose such a war to its more powerful neighbor, worried that the Pakistani military would collapse and, in the resulting chaos, lose control over its nuclear arsenal, which had never been subject to international safeguards. Following an intense round of shuttle diplomacy by American diplomats in late 2001 and early 2002, India and Pakistan eventually stepped back from the brink. So when Armitage and Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca led a delegation to Rawalpindi in October of 2003, everyone understood that the United States and Pakistan had reached yet another fateful crossroads. To drive home the seriousness of the stakes involved, Armitage reportedly brought U.S. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid into the discussions with Musharraf and the leaders of Pakistan’s security forces. The Americans had a simple message: Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of the Pakistani bomb,” was running a bazaar for nuclear technologies, materials, and designs, putting nuclear weapons potentially within reach of a worldwide clientele that included Iran, Libya, and North Korea. The United States, which for years had shared with Pakistan its suspicions about activities at Khan Research Laboratories, could no longer countenance such a serious breach in the nonproliferation firewall. Armitage presented the airtight case against Khan and his black-market network. U.S. and British intelligence had compiled a detailed itinerary of Khan’s travels and meetings with black marketeers and middlemen in Lebanon, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. Bank statements and profit ledgers indicated sales of nuclear hardware and designs thought to be in the millions of dollars. Two days earlier, on Oct. 4, a German freighter transiting the Arabian Sea toward Libya had been diverted to southern Italy, where Western intelligence agents were off-loading containers of advanced centrifuges designed to separate weapons-grade uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency was prepared to release statements, within weeks, from officials in Tripoli and Tehran outlining Khan’s assistance to their nuclear programs. The jig was up. The Implications of KhanAfter Armitage and the U.S. delegation left Pakistan, the Khan network quickly unraveled. In January 2004, Pakistan barred all of its nuclear weapons scientists from leaving the country. The government soon charged four weapons scientists and three senior, retired Pakistani military officers with proliferation-related crimes. On Feb. 4, 2004, Khan signed a full confession. “He was pardoned by Musharraf and is now under a comfortable "house arrest.” A few weeks earlier, in December 2003, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi renounced his nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration understandably touts the takedown of the Khan nuclear smuggling network, and Libya’s renunciation of its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, as its signature successes in the struggle to enforce Bush’s promise to “keep the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous regimes.” Yet the Khan episode raised nearly as many troubling questions as it answered, and the long-term implications and dangers of Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation continue to resonate within the intelligence and arms control communities. Despite repeated requests, for instance, Musharraf has never allowed U.S. intelligence experts to directly question Khan or other Pakistani nuclear scientists who were arrested in the case, including four known to have met personally with bin Laden. That refusal is widely believed to stem from fears that Kahn and his associates could implicate officials in the highest echelons of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, possibly including Musharraf himself. Shortly after Armitage’s 2003 visit and the exposure of the Khan network, Musharraf narrowly escaped two assassination attempts that targeted his convoy on the road to Rawalpindi. By all accounts, the second attempt, in December 2003, was a very near thing, and it bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation: Two suicide bombers tried to ram their explosive-laden vehicles into Musharraf’s car. The attack killed 14 police officers who were guarding the convoy. Eventually, 10 members of the Pakistani military would be arrested in the assassination attempt, and at least one would receive the death penalty. What if the assassins had succeeded? What kind of regime would then control Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal? Would it be someone like Gul, the bin Laden admirer and friend of Khan who is associated with a coalition of Islamist extremist political parties? Gul has long promoted the idea of an “Islamic bomb,” and he recently proclaimed, “Nuclear Pakistan terrifies the world, and this serves Pakistan well.” Such unknowns and what-ifs associated with the Kahn affair largely explain why many U.S. experts believe that Pakistan remains the most dangerous nation on Earth. Certainly, it resides at the very nexus of Islamic terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and rogue-government elements that the Bush administration identified as the greatest threats to U.S. national security following Sept. 11. And there is yet another reason why policy-makers have reason to fear what Pakistan represents. When India and Pakistan detonated nuclear weapons, both became something quite rare on the international scene: outliers to the nuclear nonproliferation regime. As Pakistan has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and is not a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, for instance, that country is not legally bound by treaty prohibitions on transferring nuclear-weapons-related materials or technology. Neither Pakistan nor India is subject to IAEA inspections as are NPT members, so no one knows with certitude whether their stockpiles of weapons have adequate safeguards, and whether their fissile materials are safely stored and secured. Pakistan, despite having brought the region and the world to the brink of nuclear disaster numerous times in its few short years as a declared nuclear state, has suffered almost no international isolation or sanction. Nor has India. In fact, the United States recently proposed to sell advanced ground attack F-16 aircraft to both nations. Consider, then, a disturbing scenario that goes to the heart of the NPT debate: What if Pakistan, rather than being an exception to international rules governing proliferation, becomes the norm in a world full of nuclear outliers? Who could rest easily then? A Rogue WithdrawsStanding in a drafty laboratory in North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor complex on Jan. 8, 2004, Sig Hecker, his gloved hand warmed by the contents of a heavy glass jar, raced through the math in his head. If the black and pitted metal in the jar was indeed radioactive plutonium, as he suspected, then, in all likelihood, the North Koreans were reprocessing enough weapon-grade fissile material from spent reactor fuel rods to produce several nuclear weapons a year. As the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a top U.S. nuclear weapons expert, Hecker was part of a small delegation of Americans who were witting pawns in the deadly serious game of nuclear brinkmanship that the United States and North Korea were playing out. North Korea had been the test case for the Bush administration’s new, more aggressive approach to rogue state proliferators. Since entering office, Bush and his top officials had repeatedly excoriated North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, charging that the tyrant was simply too untrustworthy for the United States to engage in bilateral talks or deals. Many administration officials viewed the Clinton-era 1994 Agreed Framework — which froze plutonium production at Yongbyon in exchange for significant U.S. economic aid and energy assistance to North Korea — as outright blackmail. In January 2002, just four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration labeled North Korea a member of the “axis of evil,” and threatened it with pre-emptive war. In October 2002, U.S. officials directly confronted Pyongyang with intelligence indicating that it had a second nuclear program, this one dedicated to covert enrichment of uranium. Much to the surprise of U.S. officials, North Korea initially didn’t even bother to deny the allegation. Instead, the “Hermit Kingdom” threw U.N. weapons inspectors out of the country, removed 8,000 nuclear reactor fuel rods from cooling ponds at Yongbyon, and became the first nation ever to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty. In the process, it exposed a loophole that allows members to exit the treaty with only six months’ notice, and to suffer no adverse consequences under treaty provisions. Since then, U.S.-brokered six-party talks, which include China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, and the United States, have proceeded, in fits and starts, to address North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. North Korea has continued to claim that it is extracting weapon-grade plutonium from the fuel rods and building upon a nuclear arsenal that probably already included one or two bombs. The American delegation, including Sig Hecker, that arrived in early 2004 was the first to visit Yongbyon since North Korea had banished the international inspectors in 2002, and was thus in the best position to test these claims. After seeing the empty cooling ponds at Yongbyon firsthand, Hecker had asked for more proof that the plutonium had actually been extracted. That’s when he was handed the glass jar with the heat-emitting metal. When he relinquished the jar, the North Koreans ran a Geiger counter over his gloves. The device confirmed radioactivity. So Hecker did the math. The North Koreans were probably sitting on 30 to 40 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium. The Yongbyon reactor had probably produced another 12 kilograms since being restarted two years earlier. Hecker didn’t know with certainty whether the North Koreans had even a single nuclear weapon, but he estimated then that they had enough fissile material to arm six or seven. Each day that the impasse between the United States and North Korea continues, that potential stockpile of weapon-grade fissile material grows. Perhaps the greatest threat that North Korea poses is that it will play to form, bartering virtually any weapon or technology it possesses on the black market for badly needed cash. Within 13 months of the U.S. delegation’s visit, for example, intelligence reports indicated that North Korea had exported uranium hexafluoride -— which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium — and that the substance eventually ended up in Libya. So Sig Hecker understood that the nuclear nonproliferation regime had sprung another sizable leak. Before the U.S. delegation left Yongbyon, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan delivered the message that was the real purpose for allowing the unusual visit. “Time is not on the United States’ side,” Gwan said.
In an interview, Hecker said, “North Korea and Iran present an immediate threat to the entire nonproliferation regime, because they both signed the NPT and then pursued nuclear weapons in direct contradiction to their responsibilities as signatories — in essence, thumbing their nose at the regime. When you combine their actions with the example of Pakistan and the A.Q. Khan network,” Hecker said, “you have to say that the world’s come to a crossroads concerning nuclear proliferation. In my opinion, if the major nuclear powers do not sit down together and decide that the threat of nuclear proliferation is absolutely the first priority in international relations — and act accordingly to strengthen the nonproliferation regime — then we are going to see the examples of North Korea and Iran repeated, over and over again. Blindman’s BluffAs his car sped through the Iranian capital last March, Joseph Cirincione marveled at the vagaries of Tehran traffic. Iranian drivers who were unsure which of two lanes was moving faster would simply straddle them both along the center divide, ensuring that no other cars passed or got an advantage. Time and again, pedestrians strolled confidently out into busy traffic as if in a game of blindman’s bluff, their eyes straight ahead and their lives faithfully in the hands of Allah. That’s when it occurred to Cirincione that the negotiators in charge of Iran’s nuclear program had followed the instincts of the Tehran streets: Always preserve your options, constantly jockey for position, push firmly ahead trusting in God’s will. Many of the cars on the streets of Tehran were scraped and badly dented, Cirincione noted, suggesting that Iranian street tactics are also vulnerable to miscalculation. As the longtime arms control expert at the Carnegie Endowment, Cirincione was in Tehran for a conference, and he was one of only a few Westerners invited to see Iran’s uranium-conversion plant at Isfahan. The facility was smaller than he had imagined, and informed sources revealed to him that early attempts at enriching uranium there had failed because the end product was too contaminated with impurities. Cirincione saw nothing at Isfahan to contradict U.S. intelligence estimates that Iran was likely five years or more away from developing an actual nuclear weapon. His hosts made a point of emphasizing at every turn, however, that Iran was absolutely determined to continue with its uranium-enrichment and other “civilian” nuclear activities, which the Iranians considered their inalienable right as a member of the nonproliferation treaty. It was just a minor oversight, they maintained, that Iran had hidden its enrichment program from IAEA inspectors for many years, in direct violation of the treaty’s transparency requirements. And they made no attempt to play down the ambition of their nuclear program, which included plans for 50,000 centrifuges capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium to fuel 20 civilian nuclear reactors. Or to produce roughly 25 nuclear bombs each year. Cirincione’s own face time with the Iranians convinced him that unless the United States and its allies can reach some kind of comprehensive deal with Tehran, the Iranians will continue to exploit the loophole in the treaty that allows members to use civilian programs to acquire the essential fissile ingredients and know-how behind nuclear weapons. That would place Tehran a simple “key turn” away from having the weapons themselves. Iran’s years-long success in concealing its uranium-enrichment activities under the nose of IAEA inspectors, Cirincione concluded, also make it a poster child for needed reforms in strengthening NPT inspection and monitoring protocols. However, because the Bush administration has adopted a different strategy focused more on counterproliferation and coercion of nuclear rogues, Cirincione knew there was little chance that U.S. officials would make the concessions necessary to bolster and reinforce the nonproliferation treaty. Administration officials have refused to even meet with their Iranian counterparts to discuss a possible deal, instead leaving the job to a consortium of British, French, and German negotiators. “For 40 years, U.S. presidents viewed the danger as the spread of nuclear weapons themselves, and then the Bush administration came along with this radical, new approach that says, ‘It’s not the weapons, but rather, bad regimes that are the problem, and bad regimes need to be changed,’” Cirincione said. “That was the message behind the ‘axis of evil’ speech, and it explains why the administration is not spending a lot of effort to strengthen a nonproliferation regime of laws and international rules. As we saw with Iraq, however, that ‘regime-change’ approach is very costly and high-risk. It has also had the adverse effect of causing Iran and North Korea to actually accelerate their programs." With the old nonproliferation regime showing stress fractures, and the new Bush strategy having so far failed to stem the tide of nuclear proliferation, the entire arms control community, Cirincione says, is urgently searching for answers before the world reaches the tipping point or conflict becomes inevitable. “I happen to agree with the Bush administration that it’s absolutely unacceptable that Iran acquire nuclear weapons,” he said. “Now that we’ve laid down that red line, however, we will be obligated to take military action if they cross it, or else we demonstrate our weakness.” Iran holds another clue to the potential dangers of a world in which the grand bargain of disarmament and the discrediting of nuclear weapons is shattered, a world in which the menace of nuclear weapons is judged simply on the basis of the hands that wield them. In the 1960s, it was the United States that first supplied an oil-rich Iran with nuclear technology and a reactor. At the time, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was the shah of Iran, and the United States had few closer allies in the Middle East. But that’s the trouble with a destructive force whose key fuel, plutonium, has a half-life of about 24,000 years. Regimes and doctrines come and go. The threat of nuclear weapons lasts forever.
Iran’s parliament yesterday called on the nation to resume efforts to manufacture nuclear fuel, the New York Times reported (see GSN, May 13). “Do we have to beg the world to provide us with fuel?” said lawmaker Kazem Jalali, who spoke in favor of the nonbinding resolution. “We have not been able to master nuclear technology in the past several years, and this shows the international community has prevented us from having it.” Iran does not plan to resume uranium processing immediately, said senior Iranian nuclear negotiator Hassan Rohani. He warned, though, that negotiations with the European Union could not drag on indefinitely. “We cannot continue the negotiations with the Europeans without having resumed some of our activities,” Rohani said. “We are in favor of negotiations; we can negotiate for months, but we cannot negotiate under the present conditions,” he said. “The fact that the resumption of our activities will be delayed by several days is not a problem.” The suspension of all uranium enrichment-related activity could last another 10 days, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said yesterday. “The coming days will be the last chance for the Europeans,” he said. “With or without an agreement, we will restart our activities” (Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, May 16). The resolution still needs approval from the Iranian Guardian Council to become law, the Associated Press reported yesterday. The council is expected to approve the bill, according to AP. “Any legislation that turns into law after approval by the Guardian Council is binding for the government and the government has to implement it,” Asefi said yesterday (Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press/Portsmouth Herald, May 15). Sirus Naseri, a senior Iranian negotiator, said Saturday that Tehran was close to a deal with the European nations to allow resumption of some nuclear work, Reuters reported. “We are not at all far from having a working agreement on the resumption of Isfahan [Iran’s uranium conversion facility], as long as there is a firm intention (to reach an agreement) there on the side of the Europeans,” Naseri told Reuters. Naseri said British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s threat last week to join the United States in sending Iran to the U.N. Security Council if enrichment-related activities resumed was “not helpful and can only add to the tension.” “If the threats are addressed to the hawks in the U.S., we let them go by. But if they reflect policy, the EU should think twice. All we wish to do is exercise our rights. There is no justification to send Iran to the Security Council,” he said (Louis Charbonneau, Reuters, May 14). Iran warned today that a May 23 emergency meeting with British, French and German foreign ministers may not lead to progress in the nuclear standoff, Agence France-Presse reported. “I confirm that a meeting at the foreign ministerial level between the EU-3 and Iran will be held in a few days time in Brussels, but I want to emphasize that the chances for success are not that high,” said negotiator Hossein Mousavian. “If Iran’s file is referred to the U.N. Security Council, we are ready for all contingencies,” he added (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, May 16). Meanwhile, support has been building in the U.S. Congress for legislation that would place new restrictions on trade with Iran, AP reported today. While the Bush administration has publicly supported EU diplomatic efforts, the legislation would put Washington in a more confrontational position. Some 200 members — and growing — of the House of Representatives are co-sponsoring the measure, AP reported. Support may be weaker in the Senate, however, and lawmakers in both bodies could still block the measure. The White House has not publicly announced a position on the bill, but it generally opposes legislative moves to influence foreign policy, according to AP. “We will have the perennial and traditional battle with the executive branch as to who can have a say on foreign policy initiatives,” said Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the House bill’s main sponsor (Ken Guggenheim, Associated Press/The Guardian, May 16). U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan Friday warned Washington of a possible impasse if the Security Council is asked to consider penalties against Iran, USA Today reported. Beijing and Moscow, which have extensive financial dealings with Tehran, could veto any attempts to punish Iran with sanctions, according to USA Today. “Action or inaction will have a great impact on future cases and on our efforts to promote nuclear nonproliferation,” Annan said (Barbara Slavin, USA Today, May 16).
It remains unknown whether Pakistani authorities knew of or perhaps even were involved in the nuclear smuggling network operated by former Pakistani top nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Los Angeles Times reported today (see GSN, May 2). Former Pakistani government and military officials have told international investigators that leaders ignored warnings about Khan’s trafficking. Moreover, neither Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf nor his predecessors fully investigated Khan despite the evidence, according to the Times. His crucial role in building an atomic bomb to match India’s weapon was deemed more important than controlling his activities. Over the years, Khan had orchestrated a publicity campaign that made him so popular that he was virtually untouchable. The decision to turn a blind eye gave Khan extraordinary freedom, the Times reported. “The military knew that Khan’s orders came from the very top and that it was state policy to get the bomb, by hook or by crook,” said a former senior Pakistani military officer who was involved in nuclear oversight. “He delivered what we all thought was impossible, and that was what mattered.” Eventually, Musharraf’s desire to end the international sanctions that followed Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests forced Islamabad to rein in Khan. “It was time to stop this dirty business,” said the ex-officer. Khan continued his activities until Musharraf forced him into retirement in March 2001. As consolation, Musharraf named Khan to a Cabinet-level position as a presidential adviser and allowed him continued freedom to travel. “It was happening right under our noses and we didn’t know,” the ex-officer said. “We got what we wanted — a bomb. We knew that he was using these dubious characters, greedy suppliers in Europe and other places, but this was in our military interest. So some dirty acts were allowed to go on.” Until the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency provided evidence of Khan’s activities to Islamabad in 2003, Khan deflected accusations with allegations of a U.S. smear campaign, the Times reported. Some experts, however, believe Islamabad engaged in willful ignorance. “If Pakistani officials didn’t recognize that there was a problem here, it’s because they didn’t want to recognize it,” said Scott Sagan, co-director of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. “This is a damning indictment of their processes, and that’s the best scenario.” “What he did was simply impossible without the full cooperation of people outside his laboratory,” said Michael May, director emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a U.S. nuclear weapons facility in California. “It’s inconceivable to me that he had this broad global network without people knowing about it, even Musharraf” (Douglas Frantz, Los Angeles Times, May 16).
The extradition of a Swiss engineer arrested last year in Germany under suspicion of smuggling uranium enrichment components to Libya has been allowed to go forward, Agence France-Presse reported Friday (see GSN, March 16). Urs Tinner agreed to be extradited under a plea deal with Swiss authorities through which he would only receive a fine, according to a report Saturday in Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. German authorities said they would move Tinner within a few days (Agence France-Presse, May 13).
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