SEOUL - The search for clues to the
Israeli raid on a mysterious Syrian base this
month evokes conflicting, competing questions: Did
the North Koreans aid and advise a nascent Syrian
nuclear program - or was the raid launched to wipe
out warheads the Syrians had obtained when Saddam
Hussein held sway over Iraq?
In their
relentless quest for good news in the latest round
of six-party talks under way in Beijing on North
Korean nukes, diplomats may be inclined to
consider Iraqi involvement as a
reason for softening or
putting off demands for North Korea to come clean
on "proliferation".
South Korean Foreign
Minister Song Min-soon has said the Syrian issue
is not coming up in the talks, while US chief
envoy Christopher Hill sees nothing to stop
negotiators crashing ahead on a "roadmap" for
disabling all of North Korea's nuclear facilities.
But does this "roadmap" touch on
proliferation in the form of North Korea's alleged
Syria program - and North Korea's earlier exchange
of nuclear technology with Iran? The common
denominator is that the Syrian and Iran programs
rely on highly enriched uranium - an area in which
North Korea stoutly denies dabbling while shutting
down the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon for
fabricating warheads from plutonium.
While
most speculation focuses on the link between Syria
and North Korea, other quite differing scenarios
suggest how Syria hoped to gain nuclear-power
status - and what inspired the Israeli raid.
Analysts cite at least two bizarre explanations
for how nuclear materiel could have wound up in
Syria before the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The first is the disappearance of three
nuclear-tipped missiles from a US Air Force B-52G
bomber that went down in the Indian Ocean in
February 1991. The warheads are believed to have
been recovered three months later far off the
Somali coast and wound up in the hands of
international arms dealers.
The second is
the disappearance before the 1990 Gulf War of
three nuclear warheads that had been fabricated in
then-apartheid South Africa's nuclear program,
were sold to Iraq and were shipped to Syria
through Lebanon. According to this theory, the
final objective was to explode one of the warheads
inside Israel.
The proliferation of these
stories, however unsubstantiated, arms negotiators
with arguments for exploding claims from
Washington of evidence of North Korea's long-term
role in Syria's nuclear program. They also help to
dispel insistence by top US officials of North
Korea's advances in highly enriched uranium.
The trick for North Korea's chief envoy,
Kim Kye-gwan, is to sidestep a blanket denial,
suggesting that Pyongyang may have had some
dealings with Pakistan in the era when the
notorious Abdul Qadeer Khan was in charge of
Islamabad's program for fabricating warheads with
highly enriched uranium. If Pyongyang in those
days got some advice and maybe a few centrifuges,
Kim can always say, that's history and the North
Korean uranium program is dormant.
US
negotiators must somehow get around the assertion
by John Negroponte, the former chief of all US
intelligence, now deputy secretary of state, that
there's "no doubt that North Korea has had a
highly enriched uranium program" and failure to
admit it would "have the effect of undermining
confidence" in all North Korea says.
In
fact, US negotiators no longer attach the initials
HEU, for "highly enriched uranium", to the North
Korean program. The initials in vogue these days
are EUP for "enriched uranium program" - without
the "highly" to suggest the uranium had been
processed from gaseous uranium hexafluoride to the
level needed for a warhead.
Hill has said
the North Koreans "need to come clean" and
"explain what they have been doing, why they have
been doing it". That comment leaves enormous
latitude, in the view of analysts in Seoul, for
"flexibility", a term the South Koreans are
pressing at every juncture in the prolonged
stop-and-go process.
Negotiators can also
give an appearance of success in the talks by
poring over the "roadmap" that the Chinese hosts
are circulating among them. The objective would be
to come up with a draft that may be almost as
significant as the agreement reached in February
that provided for a multi-stage process for North
Korea to give up its warheads.
The
obstacles seemed obvious, however, from the
double-talk as negotiators walked lightly through
a minefield of potential differences.
The
sides had "basically" worked their way through
"most" of the measures for disabling North Korea's
nuclear facilities, said Hill, carefully selecting
the qualifying modifiers, while his side had "made
some proposals that we felt might be doable".
"Doable" indeed! South Korea's chief
envoy, Chun Yung-woo, not known for being
outspoken, acknowledged that there were "still
some differences between what North Korea says it
will do in the disablement-declaration phase and
the level of what the other countries expect".
Chun avoided more specifics, but the
linkage of "disablement" and "declaration" refers
to the demand that North Korea not only "disable"
its nuclear facilities but provide a list of
absolutely all it has, including what it's doing
to export nuclear know-how, components and other
materiel, all as stipulated in the February
agreement.
The time has never been better
for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to make a show
of fulfilling his promise to list everything in
his nuclear inventory and then give up the
program. Kim could even invite inspectors to look
around and go home saying that the North Koreans
had cooperated fully and everything was shut down.
The time has also never been better for
the United States to go along with an exercise in
semantics that would still not commit North Korea
to do much more than keep the lid on all it has
been doing at the Yongbyon facility without
totally disabling them.
But what does
"disabling" really mean? The implication is
agreement to reduce the facility to the point that
it would be just as difficult to revive as to
build a new one, and the inference is that North
Korea would also get rid of the warheads produced
there.
North Korea, though, clearly has
other ideas. "We don't have an agreement on what
constitutes disabling yet," Hill acknowledged
during a break in the talks. Moreover, "having
looked at what they've agreed to", he said,
"frankly, we'd like more and they'd like less, and
let's see what we end up with".
Wherever
they end up, Hill was under pressure from
Washington to come up with something other than
failure or a break in the talks.
The
reason for official US eagerness on North Korea is
that President George W Bush needs a good news
story to counterbalance the bad news from the
Middle East, notably Iraq. He and some of his most
influential advisers feel they have to be able to
claim success in North Korea before the next
presidential election in November 2008.
While the Republican Party is mired in
criticism of its record on Iraq, a claim of having
gotten Pyongyang to display good behavior on the
nuclear issue would provide a useful antidote to
disappointment elsewhere. Ultimately, a peace
treaty to replace the fragile truce that ended the
Korean War in July 1953 would burnish the image
that the Bush administration would like to project
on Korea.
North Korea also faces
deadlines. The talks are to wind down Sunday - or
Monday if extended - just as South Korean
President Roh Moo-hyun prepares to cross the line
into North Korea by road on Tuesday to meet with
Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang for a summit on "a peace
regime" for the Korean Peninsula.
Roh has
said the nuclear issue is "being resolved" and
should come up only in passing at the summit. A
declaration from the six-party talks that papered
over differences would smooth the inter-Korean
dialogue at which Roh and Kim talk up not only
peace but economic cooperation - meaning a massive
influx of aid the North badly needs.
On
the way to agreeing on a draft in Beijing,
proliferation of North Korea's nuclear expertise
to Syria appears almost as a distraction. "I can
say for sure," said South Korean Foreign Minister
Song, "it is not affecting negotiations."
Negotiators would clearly prefer other
theories for where Syria is getting its nuclear
program - and why Israel wants to destroy it -
just as they might prefer finally to accept a new
version of whatever happened to North Korea's
uranium program, highly enriched or not.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years. (Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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