Editor's note: The New York
Times reported on Monday that US intelligence
agencies had concluded that, according to
atmospheric sampling, North Korea's test explosion
was in fact powered by plutonium. The article
fails to explain the overriding significance of
the plutonium finding. The article below
(published the same day as the NYT article)
clearly describes what the implications of such a
finding are for the foreign-policy record of
President George W Bush and his predecessor, Bill
Clinton.
A critical question, easily
answered by Bush, is this: was the
nuke
that North Korea just tested a uranium-235 or
plutonium-239 device? That difference, though
seemingly technical, is of considerable
geopolitical (and just plain political)
significance.
The answer indicates whether
Bush's decision to pull out of the Bill
Clinton-era Agreed Framework directly resulted in
North Korea producing nukes from its plutonium
assets "frozen" under that framework or if North
Korea indeed did have the uranium-enrichment,
bomb-making capabilities that Bush has been
claiming - a less likely scenario for all such a
program would entail.
Bush knows what kind
of bomb was tested because the at-least partially
successful nuke blast was not completely
contained. The office of the National Intelligence
director, John Negroponte, said that analysis of
air samples gathered last week detected
radioactive debris that confirmed North Korea
conducted an underground nuclear explosion. A
radiochemical analysis of that debris would
quickly and accurately determine the type of nuke
and its fission yield.
In the past few
months there has been both good news and bad news
for Bush. North Korea conducted a test of not only
a nuclear weapon, but also ballistic missiles that
could reach the US's West Coast. The good news for
Bush is that the tests will help him justify the
zillion-dollar ballistic-missile defense
boondoggle being constructed in Alaska. The bad
news depends on whether North Korea tested a
uranium nuke or a plutonium nuke; and whether the
media elite chooses to explain the implications of
the difference to voters.
Flashback to
1994 First, let's briefly look at some
recent history. In 1992, because of a dispute with
the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
over the analysis of certain materials and
activities they were subject to under an IAEA
Safeguards Agreement - as required by the nuclear
Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT)- the North Koreans
threatened to withdraw from the NPT.
In
1994, president Bill Clinton persuaded North Korea
to sign the Agreed Framework, under which North
Korea agreed not only to remain a signatory to the
NPT, but also to shut down its 5-megawatt (MW),
plutonium-239-producing reactor; close its
spent-fuel reprocessing facilities; and place all
its existing nuclear materials - including (you
guessed it) the plutonium-239 contained in spent
fuel elements - under the lock and seal of the
IAEA; and to abandon construction of its 50-MW and
200-MW, plutonium-239-producing reactors.
At the time, the NPT had to be extended
every five years, and Clinton was hell-bent on
getting the NPT extended indefinitely and to get
all countries - especially Israel, India and
Pakistan - to become NPT signatories, and to sign
and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. For
Clinton, the Agreed Framework's principal benefit
was North Korea's promise to remain a NPT
signatory.
What did the Koreans get in
return? Well, Clinton promised to facilitate the
replacement of their graphite-moderated
plutonium-239 producing reactors with more modern
light-water nuclear power plants and promised to
provide millions of tons of fuel oil to tide them
over until the plants came on line.
But
the principal benefit the Koreans got under the
Agreed Framework was a promise by the president of
the United States to never use or threaten to use
nuclear weapons against them. And as denizens of
the Hermit Kingdom well know, over the years
several American presidents had threatened them
with nukes.
Bush aggrieved by the
agreement Well, you can imagine how
constraining Bush the Younger considered the
Agreed Framework to be. He couldn't even threaten
to nuke Kim Jong-il. Worse, Clinton had promised
when getting the NPT extended indefinitely - and
again at the 2000 NPT Review Conference - to never
use or threaten to use nukes against any NPT
signatory - including Iran.
North Korea
was on Bush's "axis of evil" along with Iran and
Iraq because it had already supplied Iran
ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel and
was developing ballistic missiles that might one
day be capable of reaching the US's West Coast and
carry warheads weighing perhaps several hundred
pounds.
So, Bush apparently saw the Agreed
Framework as constricting and welcomed a North
Korean (and Iraqi and Iranian) withdrawal from the
NPT. Although it has not been discussed much, Bush
requested a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)in
2002 not just for Iraq but also for North Korea -
and it was also highly controversial in the
intelligence community.
That document
alleged that Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan had
provided North Korea (circa 1997) a dozen or so
gas-centrifuges similar to those someone (Khan,
perhaps?) provided Iran at about the same time.
The document also alleged that the Pakistanis
trained North Korean engineers on how to operate
them. The North Koreans were "assessed" to have
produced a substantial amount of weapons-grade
uranium.
In September 2002, US officials
privately confronted the North Koreas of having a
secret uranium-235 nuke program, which the North
Koreans then vehemently denied publicly, and have
continued to deny to this day.
The
president - citing the uranium-235 nuke
"intelligence" - stopped fuel oil shipments to
North Korea in November 2002, thereby abrogating
the Agreed Framework. As Bush may have intended,
the North Koreans almost immediately announced
they were withdrawing from the NPT.
Hence,
in January 2003, on the eve of Bush's invasion of
Iraq, North Korea ejected IAEA inspectors,
restarted its plutonium-239 producing reactor and
began recovering plutonium-239 from their spent
fuel, which had been under IAEA lock and seal
since the Agreed Framework was established in
1994. By most estimates, they now have enough
plutonium-239 to make six to 10 nukes and are busy
producing more.
Thus, if the nuke was a
plutonium bomb (as it now appears to have been),
then Bush can put a nuke-armed North Korea on his
list of foreign-policy achievements. If it was a
uranium bomb, then the 2002 NIE on North Korea was
correct.
James Gordon Prather's
long association with US nuclear weapons programs
includes active duty with the Armed Forces Special
Weapons Project, participation in nuclear weapons
tests as a diagnostic physicist at Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory and as a technical director
at Sandia National Laboratory. He was chief
scientist for the army under the Ronald Reagan
administration. Dr Prather has been actively
involved since 1991 in the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici
Nuclear Threat Reduction programs.
