North Korea Nuke Program Sidetracked?

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In 2002, the Bush Administration ruptured a nuclear moratorium deal that President Clinton had made with North Korea. As a result, Pyongpang repossessed plutonium stockpiles it had put under the seal by international inspectors,and proceeded to build bombs. One of them was widely reported to have been detonated a few days ago, producing such a low yield that most analysts have concluded the device was defective.

There's a back-story behind this. It appears that Bush may have undone a covert program that successfully delayed and diffused North Korea's plutonium bomb building program, diverting resources into a different nuke effort that apparently never produced much weapons grade material. The weapon it actually ended up with was a dud.

North Korea's underground bomb test was widely estimated to yield 1/2 kiloton, only 1/30th the size of the Hiroshima bomb. While a number of explanations have been offered, this unimpressive showing raises the possibility that the North Koreans may have been led into a blind alley in their nuclear design program.

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In 2003, it was revealed that Pakistani nuclear expert A.Q. Khan had been trading nuclear technology with North Korea in exchange for Pyongpang's missile technology, which was sourced from China. Pakistan profitably used that knowledge to produce its own intermediate range buclear missiles that threaten India.

It now appears that Pakistan got a far better end of that deal. The Pakistan-supplied centrifuges may have actually delayed the NK nuclear bomb program. Korea already had enough plutonium on hand for 2-5 nukes, produced during the 1970s and 1980s in graphite reactors acquired from the Soviet Union.

The side-deal with A.Q. Khan to start up a highly-enriched uranium (HEU) process required the purchase and construction of an entirely different production process. In order to pursue the Pakistani bomb plans, NK had to purchase components for thousands of expensive gas centrifuge machines, on top of the cost of keeping North Koreas's old Soviet-era reactors going.

By 2002, when the Bush Administration broke the Clinton agreement that locked away the plutonium rods under IAEA seal, Pyonyang had spent hundreds of millions starting up HEU production -- which produced little weapons grade material -- money that could have been spent on upgrading its proven Russian-designed graphite reactors.

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This is what actually happened:

The graphite reactors that produced the plutonium likely used in the test were provided by the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s, and enough plutonium was extracted from these fuel rods in the 1980s to make one or two bombs. http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/nuke/index.html

These rods were put under seal by the IAEA in the mid 1990s following an agreement with the Clinton Administration. Pyongyang essentially agreed not to weaponize the bulk of the plutonium it had already produced in exchange for U.S. commitments to not attack, along with fuel oil imports and an opening of trade.

In 2002, NK reposssessed its plutonium stocks after the Bush Administration, citing alleged cheating by Pyongpang, publicly condemned NK as one of the "axis of evil" countries and broke off the deal. The North Koreans then kicked out the IAEA inspectors, and proceeded to process additional plutonium using the same old Soviet design reactors.

The Bush Administration imposed new terms on Pyongpang. It demanded that North Korea hand over its plutonium stocks and scrap its old reactors in exchange for light-water plants, which are not suitable for producing fissible weapons-grade materials. In the face of increasingly hostile demands, Jong-il refused that offer, and they were never delivered.

The Bush Administration cites cooperation between North Korea and the Pakistan-based A.Q. Khan network based in Pakistan. The centrifuges that Korea obtained, however, can not be used to produce the additional plutonium needed for its pre-existing weapons program. These devices produce highly enriched uranium (HEU), instead. If anything, the diversification into Pakistani-provided technologies may have distracted scarce resources from efforts to build additional plutonium bombs. The Bush Administration's action may have thus been a pretext to break the Clinton deal, resulting in the escalation of tensions in Asia.

In response to requests for information about the North Korean nuclear program and its alleged links with A.Q. Khan, the Congressional Research Service produced a detailed report, "Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade Between North Korea and Pakistan (2004): http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/30781.pdf

That work remains perhaps the best open source document about the Pakistan-North Korea connection.

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While Bush actually jump-started the NK nuclear program, Clinton-era counter-proliferation work may in fact have be responsible for its poor showing at the finish.