North Korea has nukes!!!!
It surely this North Korean announcment is no surprise:

North Korea boasted publicly for the first time Thursday that it has nuclear weapons and said it will stay away from disarmament talks... .

As Chad Evans headlined, "North Korea Announced it has Nukes . . . Again." As he recounts, the DPRK announced in April 2003 that it possessed atomic warheads and were thought long before that to possess enough plutonium to produce them. Just lately we learned that the they had supplied the enriched uranium to Libya for its atomic weapons program.

The N. Korean's announcement that they are done with disarmament talks means nothing because they never actually participated in such talks to begin with. Oh, they showed up, but their presence was never anything but temporizing while their nuclear program continued apace.

Today's claim may not even be true; the Dear Leader's government is the world's leader in mendacity and prevarication. No Western intelligence service doubts that the DPRK has the techonology, the scientists, the engineers and the fissile material needed to produce atomic warheads. But there is no certainty, there is no "slam dunk" on this matter simply because the North Korean government is the most insular in the world.

The real question is just how much further along this announcement moves nearby countries to militarize in arms or in spirit. Two years ago Japan announced that it would militarily pre-empt North Korean aggression against Japan. In fact, Japan may have a covert atomic-weapons program all its own. Analyst Phar Kim Beng wrote a year ago that Japan could be an atomic power within months. Japan openly owns more than a sufficient amount of plutonium for dozens of nukes. In fact, 25 months ago, at the brewing of the last atomic crsis with North Korea, ago Japan announced it had somehow misplaced more than 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to make 25 atomic warheads (leading Scrappleface to write that "N. Korea Offers to Return Japan's Lost Plutonium." However, the loss occurred incrementally since 1987 and the International Atomic Energy Commission concluded "that the root of the problem was imprecise measurement and sampling techniques').

I don't often agree with NYT columnist Nicholas Kristoff, but yestderday's column offers food for thought. Claiming that "the most dangerous failure of U.S. policy these days is in North Korea," Kristoff goes on to say,

In fairness, Mr. Bush is paralyzed only because the alternatives are dreadful. A military strike on North Korea's nuclear sites might have been an option in the early 1990's, but today we don't know where the plutonium and the uranium are kept, so a military strike might accomplish little - but trigger a new Korean war. To fill the time, Mr. Bush has pursued six-party talks involving North Korea, but they have gotten nowhere.

So what would work?

The other option is the path that Richard Nixon pursued with Maoist China: resolute engagement, leading toward a new "grand bargain" in which Kim Jong Il would give up his nuclear program in exchange for political and economic ties with the international community. This has the advantage that the best bet to bring down Mr. Kim, the Dear Leader, isn't isolation, but contacts with the outside world.

Yet Kristoff himself admits that this idea is attractive only because all other options are either not feasible or much worse than this one. Would such ties as Kristoff proposes do any good? The cynic in me replies that these kinds of ties haven't done any good in loosening up Cuba.

But I don't have better ideas. And the nightmare scenario isn't nuclear-tipped, North Korean missiles, anyway. As I wrote in August 2003 in "Balance of power against North Korea,"

Our first atomic weapon needed the largest bomber the Air Force had to fly it to Hiroshima. The present state of the art enables equally destructive weapons to be manufactured as a kit that can be smuggled in pieces into the United States and reassembled. Yes, smuggling the radioactive fission material would present a challenge. However, consider this scenario: All the other pieces would be smuggled in first, received by al Qaeda sleeper or others ideologically allied with them, and then the fission material is sent. In fact, more than one fission warhead is sent, maybe several - North Korea has a robust processing capability. They could well send a dozen fission sets to be smuggled into the country. Care to bet we would intercept them all? I wouldn't.

North Korea is certainly evil enough to do swuch a thing. The great unknown is whether they are stupid enough, and that just can't be answered.

What to do? I don't know, and from all I can tell, neither does the Bush administration.

Endnote: Kristoff also explains why pinning this all on Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and the Agreed Framework doesn't hold water.

by Donald Sensing, 2/10/2005 09:35:00 PM. Permalink |