Did North Korea Cheat?

Selig S. Harrison

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

Summary:  Two years ago, Washington accused Pyongyang of running a secret nuclear weapons program. But how much evidence was there to back up the charge? A review of the facts shows that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data--while ignoring the one real threat North Korea actually poses.

Selig S. Harrison is Director of the Asia Program and Chairman of the Task Force on U.S. Korea Policy at the Center for International Policy. He is also a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of Korean Endgame.

The Bush administration, however, has made a much more serious charge: that North Korea has been secretly making nuclear weapons that might be deployed by "mid-decade" and thus cannot be trusted to honor a new denuclearization agreement. If it turns out that Pyongyang has developed no operational enrichment facilities at all--or only LEU, not HEU, facilities--Washington's claim will be discredited.

The CIA assessment rests, at bottom, on the assumption that North Korea has received extensive help and equipment from Pakistan. Some intelligence suggesting this possibility did surface during the Clinton presidency. "We raised fairly generalized concerns with Pakistan about nuclear cooperation with North Korea," recalls Robert Einhorn, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation. "But we didn't cite chapter and verse because we didn't have chapter and verse to cite." Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, moreover, has flatly denied that Islamabad gave North Korea nuclear technology in exchange for North Korean missiles, saying that "whatever we bought from them was with money."

Recent revelations that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ousted director of Islamabad's nuclear program, ran a black-market supply ring for nuclear materials have strengthened suspicions of a Pakistan-North Korea connection. Here again, however, the facts remain murky. Khan has not discussed the specifics of his misdeeds publicly, and conflicting statements about North Korea have been attributed to him. A June 2002 CIA assessment that was leaked after the Kelly visit said that Pakistan had provided North Korea with centrifuge prototypes and blueprints, but that it was uncertain how many, if any, centrifuges North Korea had made from them. The possibility that such prototypes were supplied to Pyongyang is supported by the fact that the aluminum tubes intercepted by France in 2003 matched the type used by Pakistan. But there is no basis for assuming that Pakistani help went beyond the supply of an uncertain number of demonstration centrifuges and associated replacement parts. When the Khan nuclear smuggling network was exposed, it turned out that a factory in Malaysia had supplied Libya with centrifuges. But the detailed Malaysian police report on the factory's exports makes no reference to North Korea, and U.S. officials acknowledge that there is no evidence that it supplied anything to North Korea. Moreover, the detailed review of British intelligence on nuclear and missile proliferation conducted by the Butler Committee linked Khan solely to Libya and made no mention of any help by his network to North Korea.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

If North Korea's enrichment program never in fact progressed beyond some degree of LEU experimentation or production, there may yet be a face-saving way for Pyongyang to acknowledge the existence of enrichment facilities in the early stages of the denuclearization negotiations. So far, however, the United States has demanded the removal of all enrichment facilities in North Korea, despite the fact that the NPT permits LEU operations for civilian programs if adequate inspection is permitted. Since the United States has made similar demands of Brazil and Iran, an LEU compromise with North Korea would have to be part of a larger policy shift in Washington.

Such a compromise would be further complicated by the fact that the uranium issue has become a political football in the internal North Korean policy struggle between pragmatists, who favor a nuclear settlement, and hard-liners, mainly in the armed forces, who resist one. On a visit to Pyongyang in April 2004, a ranking general told me that Pyongyang wanted to keep the world guessing about North Korea's HEU capabilities since it "strengthens our deterrent posture."

To find out definitively how far the North Korean enrichment program has gone, the United States and the other powers in the six-party talks should insist on stringent inspection terms in a denuclearization process. Eventually, the IAEA "Additional Protocol," which provides for intrusive inspections, should be extended from South Korea to North Korea. Pyongyang is not likely to permit such intrusive access, however, until the final stages of a step-by-step denuclearization process in which concessions by the United States and North Korea's neighbors build trust by reducing Pyongyang's economic and military insecurity.

North Korea can hide uranium-enrichment facilities from aerial surveillance more easily than plutonium facilities. North Korean cooperation in intrusive, on-the-ground inspections would therefore be necessary to determine whether Pyongyang is developing a weapons-grade enrichment capability, and if so, how close it has come to producing significant amounts of weapons-grade fissile material.

Unless conclusive new evidence comes to light, the entire uranium issue should be deferred so that the parties can focus on the more immediate threat: North Korea's known plutonium-reprocessing capabilities. Since the 1994 agreement collapsed, there is clear evidence that Pyongyang has reprocessed some or all of the 8,000 plutonium fuel rods at the Yongbyon reactor that had been safeguarded under the accord. By scuttling the 1994 agreement on the basis of uncertain data that it presented with absolute certitude, and by insisting that North Korea "confess" to the existence of a uranium program before new negotiations on denuclearization can begin, the Bush administration has blocked action on the one present threat that North Korea is known to pose: the threat represented by its reprocessed plutonium, which could be used for nuclear weapons or transferred to third parties.