WASHINGTON - Last week's
agreement between the United States and North
Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear program - the first
negotiated progress on the issue in four years -
has spurred debate about whether the new deal will
stick.
While there has been widespread
speculation about whether North Korea will really
suspend work at its uranium enrichment plant at
Yongbyon, refrain from nuclear and missile
testing, and allow the return of international
inspectors in exchange for 240,000 tons of US food
aid, little attention has been given to the impact
those actions would actually have on Pyongyang's
nuclear program.
So are the deal's
undertakings mostly symbolic confidence-building
gestures, or will they have bite? A closer
inspection of
North Korea's promised
actions shows that while the measures could slow
the pace of progress of its nuclear development,
they will not necessarily completely halt the
program.
Significantly, the deal does not
cover any nuclear weapons that North Korea has
already produced - and the outside world may
remain in the dark about the size and
sophistication of those weapons for some time to
come.
A key feature of the agreement
announced on February 29 was North Korea's promise
to halt operations at its uranium enrichment
facility in the Yongbyon nuclear complex. The new
modern centrifuge plant, which could be producing
material for nuclear weapons, became public
knowledge after it was shown to a group of US
academics including Stanford University Professor
Siegfried Hecker in November 2010.
While
the announced suspension has been widely greeted
as a positive development, there is an important
catch: the facility at Yongbyon is unlikely to be
the only uranium enrichment plant North Korea
currently operates. In other words, a promised
moratorium at the Yongbyon facility does not
necessarily put a stop to all uranium enrichment
activities in the country.
"When you build
an enrichment plant like this, you need to have a
place to do your research and development and
testing," Olli Heinonen, a senior fellow at
Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs, said in a telephone
interview. "So most likely there is at least one
location where they have been doing this," said
the former deputy director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Hecker, who headed the Los Alamos National
Laboratory from 1986 to 1997, has also concluded
that North Korea must also have a pilot-scale
centrifuge plant at an undisclosed location. "We
are still not certain of what they can produce at
an undisclosed site, but I believe it is limited,"
Hecker said in an e-mail message to Asia Times
Online.
Diplomats have pointed out that
even without concrete evidence, it would be
logical for North Korea to maintain uranium
enrichment facilities outside of Yongbyon. The
fact that Yongbyon's nuclear capabilities have
been shown to an American delegation and is also
visible in satellite images makes it a potential
target for a military attack. The diplomatic logic
follows that North Korea would not risk putting
their investment and technology all in one place,
and therefore should have at least one other
facility elsewhere.
How much progress
North Korea has made at the uranium enrichment
facility in Yongbyon is difficult to assess, but
both Hecker and Heinonen indicate it could be
limited, as North Korea has claimed, if it became
operational shortly before Hecker's visit there in
2010. Low-enriched uranium is used as fuel for
light-water reactors. Material for nuclear weapons
must be enriched further to what is called
weapons-grade or high-enriched uranium.
"It typically takes a lot of time and
effort to get centrifuge cascades to work
perfectly," Hecker said in the same e-mail
message. "They may have perfected the operations
and produced some low-enriched uranium. … On the
other hand, it is also possible that they are
still struggling to make the centrifuge facility
work smoothly."
Limited
inspections Clues to how far North Korea
has come in its uranium enrichment program will
become available when IAEA inspectors return to
the Yongbyon complex, as promised in the new deal.
It will represent the first time IAEA inspectors
are allowed to enter the facility since they were
kicked out of the country in April 2009. Details
of when and under what conditions the inspectors
will be allowed access to the facility have yet to
be determined.
In the agreement, North
Korea also promised to refrain from carrying out
new nuclear tests. This is expected to help limit
the sophistication of North Korea's existing
nuclear weapons, as many experts believe
Pyongyang's tests in 2006 and 2009 have not
yielded enough data and confidence to put nuclear
warheads on missiles.
One expert, however,
argues that North Korea may already have enough
data to move ahead with the development of nuclear
warheads that can be mounted on shorter-range
missiles that could reach neighboring South Korea
and Japan.
Larry Niksch, who analyzed
North Korea for 43 years at the nonpartisan
Congressional Research Service, said in a
telephone interview that given such factors as
information that North Korea gleaned from A Q
Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb,
Pyongyang probably has enough information to
weaponize its nuclear capabilities.
"I
don't think they have to test in order to move
ahead with nuclear warheads for the Nodong
missiles," said Niksch, who is now a senior
associate at the Washington-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies. Nodong (or
Rodong) missiles armed with conventional weapons
or weapons of mass destruction have the range to
reach US military bases in Japan. The moratorium
on nuclear tests, therefore, is likely to have
little or no benefit to Japan or South Korea,
Niksch added.
The moratorium on long-range
missile launches has been welcomed by many
observers as both a confidence-building measure
and a move to constrain North Korea's development
of missile technology. But some view the
moratorium with skeptically, arguing that North
Korea has already found a way to work around the
inability to carry out its own missile tests.
"North Korea has been able to enlist
surrogate countries as testers, in order to in
effect bypass their own missile moratorium,"
Niksch said. He said that North Korea has
benefited from Pakistan's and Iran's tests of
their versions of the Rodong missile - the Ghauri
and Shahab-3 respectively - as well as Iran's
reported testing of the longer-range Musudan
missile developed by North Korea.
It is
also significant that the recent agreement is not
designed to deal with the nuclear materials North
Korea has already developed - a stockpile of what
US security analysts estimate to be 30 to 50
kilograms of separated plutonium, or enough for at
least six nuclear weapons. Hecker's estimate is
between 24 to 42 kilograms of plutonium, which he
believes is enough for four to eight crude nuclear
bombs.
Hecker says North Korea is unlikely
to have added to that stockpile as the
5-megawatt-electric nuclear reactor in the
Yongbyon complex that was shut down in 2007 as
part of the Six-Party Talks agreement remained
inactive when he visited the site in November
2010, and that there is reason to believe that it
has remained in a stand-by status since.
Yet the exact size and sophistication of
North Korea's plutonium stockpile remains shrouded
in mystery to the outside world, and how to deal
with it will be left to further discussions beyond
the recently agreed deal. A comprehensive
assessment of North Korea's nuclear development
will remain difficult until the IAEA gains
nationwide access, Niksch said.
"You
really have to get the IAEA in North Korea and
they have to be able to conduct inspections
throughout North Korean territory, not just
Yongbyon," Niksch said. If North Korea is
determined to make progress with their nuclear and
missile programs, the obligations in the deal
"will not really prevent them from moving ahead,"
he added.
Naoko Aoki is a
journalist based in Washington DC. She formerly
covered Japanese domestic politics and economic
policy for Japan's Kyodo News before serving as
the news service's Beijing correspondent from 2004
to 2009. She has visited North Korea on 18
separate occasions.
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