Amazingly, by 1996 all three former Soviet republics were nuclear weapon free. In 2012 Ukraine’s final shipment of weapon-grade uranium was sent to Russia.
Pseudo-Disarmers: North Korea and Iran
HOSTILE STATES manipulate the international community to frustrate nonproliferation enforcement. North Korea and Iran have been following the same playbook, with North Korea having already crossed the finish line and Iran rapidly approaching it. They use dummy firms to purchase prohibited items; they launder money to fund their program; they make serial offers of pseudo-concessions to curry goodwill; and they use negotiations to stall.
When nice does not work they use not-nice: threats of war, or other forms of intimidation—terrorism, hostage taking, etc. They use elaborate schemes to evade inspection regimes—phony accounting, commercial use, and materials unaccounted for.
North Korea, to put it gently, has played U.S. diplomats—and several presidents—like the proverbial violin. Former president Jimmy Carter’s 1994 visit to Pyongyang is just one of these cases. Traveling there against the wishes of President Clinton, Carter came back with news that the North was ready to make a deal, and would stay within the Nonproliferation Treaty. Indeed—but on its terms, not ours.
When State Department diplomat Robert Gallucci returned to the U.S. after signing the Agreed Framework that laid out the U.S.-North Korea deal President Carter had worked out, the Americans assumed that the crisis had passed. After all, North Korea had committed to shut down its Yongbyon facility, whose design and operation facilitated production of weapons-grade plutonium. Pyongyang also agreed to use plutonium fuel for commercial reactor production only. In return the U.S. agreed to supply the North with two light-water nuclear reactors designed to be less usable for proliferation (that is, plutonium production). The U.S. also threw in fuel oil to help the North meet its domestic energy need.
Needless to say, North Korea deceived inspectors over the next eight years, as it clandestinely diverted fuel for a bomb. Its October 4, 2002, statement to U.S. diplomats that it had developed a uranium-enrichment capability for a bomb was not sufficient to convince the Bush administration that the North had in fact joined the nuclear club, but it led to the suspension of nuclear cooperation on November 21.
Less than a month later, the North announced it would restart its Yongbyon facility, and it formally announced its withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty at the start of 2003. Its underground atomic test in October 2006 proved that the world’s nuclear club had a new member.
Yet this reality only intensified U.S. diplomatic efforts—at times via the “six-party talks” that added South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia as parties—to tame the North’s nuclear program. Carrot and stick diplomacy followed, with, as ever in such talks with bad guys, more carrot than stick. In 2007 the U.S. unfroze $25 million of assets on Pyongyang’s promise that the money would be used for humanitarian purposes. In 2007 North and South Korea agreed to hold talks aimed at a final formal peace treaty to officially end the Korean War.[53] On October 11, 2008, the Bush State Department took North Korea off the terrorism list, making it eligible for more aid.
The North responded to these gracious gestures early in 2009, conducting a series of long-range missile tests of multistage missiles, including one shot fired over Japan, towards Hawaii (though landing short of it). Pyongyang also seized two journalists who had wandered over the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas, holding them for 140 days. It took a personal visit from former president Clinton to obtain their release, thus saving them from a show trial and many years in prison. And in May 2009 it conducted a second underground nuclear test, one more powerful than its first, though generally believed to be less powerful than the 14-kiloton Hiroshima blast—the North’s designs remain rudimentary. As this book went to press the North was preparing to conduct its third nuclear test. Or it may be a fifth test, given that monitoring equipment has suggested, though analysts have been unable to confirm, that tests have taken place twice since its second test. This uncertainty shows that nuclear forensic detection is far from guaranteed to detect clandestine activity.
In 2010 things got even worse. On March 26 the North torpedoed a South Korean ship, the Cheonan; the ship sank with all hands. On November 12, the North unveiled its pilot uranium enrichment facility to a group of U.S. officials and scientists. Thus in addition to its ability to divert spent plutonium from spent nuclear fuel (the method used to fuel its two nuclear tests) Pyongyang now has the ability to fuel bombs with enriched uranium.
In sum, having never once since its 1948 creation honored a commitment in full, the North is, if nothing else, consistent. Its ace of trumps is duplicity, its ability to manipulate Western hopes that bad guys will become good. In the real world, for good things to take place there must be positive regime change, as happened in the former Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.
The experience with North Korea repeated itself with Iran. After UN inspectors revealed Iran’s clandestine nuclear program in August 2002, a familiar drama unfolded. In 2003 the EU3 (Britain, France, and Germany) began three years of negotiations with Iran, seeking to confine it to commercial nuclear use. This effort went on despite the evident reality that Iran sits on immense oil and natural gas reserves (its energy dependency comes from lack of refining capacity, requiring it to ship some three-fifths of its oil elsewhere to be refined and returned for domestic consumption). In 2006 the U.S., Russia, and China joined the negotiations.
On November 30, 2007, U.S. officials released a new National Intelligence Estimate—reversing their position of two years earlier—concluding “with high confidence” that Iran had abandoned covert uranium enrichment four years earlier, in 2003, and also abandoned efforts to produce a nuclear weapon. But the estimate treated uranium enrichment, which is by far the main event in terms of going nuclear rogue, as commercial. As Vice President Cheney noted in his memoir, weaponization can be rapidly resumed.
In September 2009, on the eve of the annual UN General Assembly session in New York, in order to preempt a disclosure of the facility by the U.S., Iran revealed a new, hitherto undisclosed uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom. The facility, which the U.S. had monitored for several years, has a 3,000-centrifuge capacity—far too small to be useful for a commercial program.
Instead of acknowledging the danger posed by Iran, President Obama’s response was to talk at the UN session about negotiating a new superpower arms treaty with the Russians, thus “setting an example” for other nuclear powers to reduce—and, eventually, eliminate—their own nuclear arsenals. It was left to French president Nicholas Sarkozy to point out that there were two present nuclear dangers—North Korea and Iran—that deserved prompt attention. The president went on in April 2010 to sign New START with Russia, and a month later presided over a two-day international nuclear proliferation summit in Washington, talking anew about moving towards a “nuclear-free” world.
Iran continues to proceed with open contempt for the U.S. and others, steadily increasing its military capabilities—testing longer-ranger multistage ballistic missiles, and launching a satellite. It continues working on advanced warhead design (necessary to build a compact nuclear warhead to sit atop a missile), including specialized devices with no civilian application, such as a neutron initiator, part of the triggering mechanism for a bomb. It has installed newer, faster centrifuges at its Fordo facility near Qom, aiming to speed up uranium enrichment to produce fuel for a uranium bomb.
53
The 1953 armistice merely withdrew forces 2,000 meters (2,200 yards, 1¼ miles) from the 1953 front lines. Since 1953, North Korea has repeatedly violated the border, sometime even killing military personnel working in the demilitarized Joint Security Area (JSA), a four-kilometer-wide zone with one half in each Korea; the 38th parallel literally bisects the conference table within the JSA that is used for negotiations.