Federal Judiciary

Getting Serious about North Korea?s Nukes

News this weekend that North Korea showed off 2,000 uranium-enrichment centrifuges and the initial construction of a 100-megawatt light-water reactor before a visiting team of American scientists generated two very different political responses. In Seoul, U.S. special envoy for North Korea Stephen Bosworth immediately declared, 'This is not a crisis.' The Japanese government, meanwhile, insisted that it was 'absolutely unacceptable,' and South Korean defense minister Kim Tae-young told South Korea's parliament that he was considering asking the U.S. to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons on South Korean soil.

Clearly our Asian allies are not taking the news in stride, especially not after North Korea's artillery attack this week against Yeonpyeong Island. We shouldn't either.

#ad#What the North Koreans revealed is pretty significant: They claim that their 2,000 centrifuges are capable of producing up to 8,000 separative work units -- or two bombs' worth of weapons-grade uranium -- per year. The 'small' light-water reactor they are now building, they claim, could come on line as soon as 2012. Its planned generating capacity is roughly five times that of the reactor North Korea used to make its current crop of plutonium bombs. That's enough to make five bombs' worth of plutonium a year.

If North Korea only meant to use these new nuclear facilities for itself, that would still be alarming. It's conceivable that North Korea could plug a 100-megawatt reactor into the country's rickety electrical grid without blowing it apart, though it is doubtful that the North Koreans could perfect the kind of reactor fuel that would allow the machine to produce optimal amounts of power. What's far more likely is that Pyongyang will only be able to produce low-burn-up fuels for the reactor, optimal to make uneven-isotope plutonium -- which just happens to be the ideal type of plutonium for making nuclear weapons.

North Korea already has several plutonium bombs. Now it can make more bombs with more advanced designs that use both uranium and plutonium in their cores. How many? It's unclear, since we have no idea where else, if at all, North Korea might have covert enrichment plants hidden.

What's more worrisome is that North Korea is almost certain to put its enrichment and reactor technology on the world market, just as it helped Syria make its plutonium-producing reactor and has helped Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan with their nuclear-capable-rocket programs. China and Iran helped facilitate the Syrian-reactor effort. One can only wonder what role those states might play in helping North Korea hawk its new nuclear wares.

U.S. and other intelligence agencies have known that North Korea was working on uranium enrichment since former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto reportedly negotiated a nuclear exchange with Pyongyang back in the early 1990s, but the actual progress and specifics of the program have been much more difficult to pinpoint. Now, with North Korea's latest nuclear surprise, it has become all the more necessary for the U.S. to take action to prevent other states from following North Korea's example or, just as bad, buying its nuclear goods. Instead of simply talking about engaging North Korea in more talks, the U.S. and its Asian allies need to get serious about dealing with Pyongyang.

#page#This will require, first and foremost, getting on with the business of planning for a world in which the gang now running North Korea is put out of business. Working with South Korea and Japan, the U.S. should call for unification of the two Koreas on terms acceptable to the South. It should invite China to participate if it wants. Any serious effort will require South Korea to borrow to finance the transition and China to come to terms with possible refugee issues and the like.

Second, the U.S. and other responsible nuclear-supplier states must condition all future civilian nuclear-cooperative deals with any nuclear non-weapons state upon that country's willingness to forswear making nuclear fuel -- a process that can bring them to the very brink of acquiring nuclear weapons. For the U.S., this means demanding this concession in the nuclear-cooperative deals it is about to cut with Vietnam, Jordan, and South Korea.

#ad#President Obama has a decision memorandum in his inbox on whether the U.S. should insist on including such a condition in those deals. It was one of the key requirements of the U.S.–United Arab Emirates agreement Obama finalized last year. When Obama pushed the UAE deal, he sold it as the new international 'gold standard' for nuclear-cooperative agreements. He has all the more reason to back that standard now.

The U.S. should also put pressure on France, Russia, Japan, and South Korea to adopt such stricter conditions in their own nuclear-cooperative agreements. Most of those states are trying to expand their nuclear business in the U.S. and so are asking for U.S. federal loan guarantees or licenses. Recently, 17 nonproliferation experts on both the left and the right asked the president to require, as a condition of such U.S. assistance, that a firm's country follow our nonproliferation lead. That's sound advice.

Third, the U.S. and its allies will have to work harder to interdict what is certain to be increased North Korean trade in both reactor and enrichment technology. The first order of business is to learn just who helped North Korea and how. China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, and Japan all had a hand. We need to drive to ground what these past supply lines were if we are ever to stem future flows of nuclear-weapons assistance.

Finally, the U.S. and its friends need to be far more candid about what nuclear activities can be kept peaceful. Last year, the House called on the administration to clarify just what the International Atomic Energy Agency can and cannot reliably safeguard in a timely fashion against military diversions. Clearly, if we don't start admitting what the limits are to the concept of 'atoms for peace,' the nuclear alarm that North Korea just set off will simply be a prelude to a world full of nuclear-weapons-ready states.

— Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and editor of The Global Expansion of Nuclear Energy: Weighing Its Costs and Risks (U.S. Army War College, forthcoming).

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on November 23, 2010 (boomark / email).