Arms Control Wonk

If you somehow missed the Asan Plenum back in June, here’s your chance to catch an encore performance. Of one presentation, anyway. The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies is holding a breakfast roundtable featuring yours truly with the University of Pittsburgh’s Dennis Gormley. The subject is — you guessed it! — the rise and fall of North Korean missile exports. And since there was no Gormley commentary in Seoul, the remake stands to improve on the original.

Details below the jump. Hope to see you there.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011
9:00 – 11:00 am
The George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs Lindner Family Commons
1957 E Street, NW, 6th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20052

North Korea has been one of the world’s most active suppliers of ballistic missile systems since the mid-1980s, but the nature of its missile export business has changed significantly during this period, moving from sales of complete missiles to sales of production equipment and components, and, finally, to collaborative missile development. Speakers will review the evolution of this important transition and its disturbing implications for international efforts to control missile proliferation.

Please RSVP to NonproliferationReview@gmail.com

A complimentary continental breakfast and copies of the July issue of The Nonproliferation Review will be available at the event.

Update | Sept. 15. Audio and video will be posted at the event page at the CNS website.

Late update | Oct. 1. Video of the entire event (Pollack, Gormley, Q&A) is now available at the CNS event page. Here’s just the first piece:

Since giving a presentation on North Korea’s missile trade last month in Seoul at the Asan Plenum, I’ve had a couple of requests to explain the data sources more precisely. Much of the curiosity stems from an article in the English-language online edition of the Chosun Ilbo that attributed the data to “a report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service.” Well, not exactly. Good luck finding any report like that.

OK, then. Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about where the numbers come from. Seriously, you’ve been warned.

For aficionados of CRS, the headline of this post has already given half the game away. Richard F. Grimmett’s annual reports, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,” contain a heap of unique data on, well, what the title says. (The reports state that they contain “official, unclassified, background data from US government sources.”) And they’re my source for how many complete missile systems North Korea is known to have delivered abroad, to what regions, in what years.

(Prior to 1995, the reports were called “Conventional Arms Transfers to the Third World.” Prior to 1991, they were called “Trends in Conventional Arms Transfers to the Third World by Major Supplier.” What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.)

Still, one thing the Grimmett reports won’t tell you is very much specifically about North Korea. Getting from Grimmett’s raw data to a reconstruction of North Korean missile deliveries took a heap of work, to use a technical term. The results appear as Table 1 in “Ballistic Trajectory: The Evolution of North Korea’s Ballistic Missile Market,” which appears in the current issue of the Nonproliferation Review. You can download it free of charge.

The best things in life are free, they always say.

A Peek Inside the Sausage Factory

Ballistic missiles appear in the Grimmett reports as “surface-to-surface” missiles, or SSMs. (It appears that this category has yet to capture any cruise missiles, which either count as anti-ship missiles or have been excluded by virtue of being air-launched.) The first step was to figure out which figures in this category could be attributed to North Korea. Of the six categories of arms sellers — U.S., Russia, China, Major West European, All Other European, and All Others — just three are recorded as delivering SSMs: Russia, China, and All Others. Based on an extensive, iron-rich diet of missile-related readings, I’ve concluded that the “All Others” SSM numbers for 1987 through 2009 correspond to North Korea. Why 1987? See especially Joe Bermudez’s paper from 1999 on the history of the North Korean missile program.

The second step was processing Grimmett’s numbers. Each report covers the prior eight years, and contains tables with two four-year bins for arms deliveries to each region of the globe, e.g., 2002-2005 and 2006-2009. The earliest available period involving a sane definition of SSMs (i.e., one that excludes anti-tank missiles!) is 1984-1987, which enables reconstruction of figures starting from 1984.

Naturally, each bin repeats four years after its initial appearance. For example, there’s a 1991-1994 bin in the 1995 report, and the same thing again in the 1999 report. The numbers in these repeated bins aren’t fully consistent, indicating retrospective updates in the underlying database. I resolved these inconsistencies in favor of the more recent reports.

The third step was to convert the four-year bins into annual data. This started with exercises in logic. For example, there were (about) 90 SSMs delivered from “All Others” to the Near East in 1992-1995, (about) 30 SSMs in 1993-1996, and zero in 1994-1997. It’s a straightforward inference that there were about 60 deliveries in 1992 (the difference between 90 and 30), about 30 deliveries in 1993, and none thereafter through 1997.

Unfortunately, the data contained a few irresolvable inconsistencies. After struggling with alternative interpretations, I opted for whatever reconstruction tended to favor more recent reports while minimizing the overall “error,” again on the assumption that retrospective updates were responsible for the apparent problem. The differences between interpretations are small in any case, and the inconsistencies were few to begin with. But reader beware: because of the retrospective-updating phenomenon, recent numbers should be considered provisional. As subsequent Grimmett reports appear, I might get around to revising the table. Watch this space.

The Soviet Scud Question

To get a fuller picture of the global missile market, I carried out these steps not only for North Korea but also Russia and China. All three appear in the paper in Table 1. The Soviet figures contain an oddity: a staggering 1,660 SSM deliveries to “Asia” from 1989 to 1991. These figures correspond to the appearance of Scud missiles on the battlefield in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Soviet ground troops in 1988. Did the Soviets really export that many missiles over such a short period?

In the end, I discounted these numbers, a choice supported by reports that “all functions connected with the security, transportation, storage and launch of Scud missiles [in Afghanistan] are handled by Soviet advisers.” In other words, they weren’t exports at all, but were missiles operated abroad by Red Army troops. A book co-authored by a retired ISI Brigadier, Mohammed Yousaf, makes essentially the same claim.

How long that situation persisted is less clear. An article by Bermudez in the February 1992 issue of Jane’s Intelligence Review dated the arrival of the Scuds to October 1988, commenting that “there is little doubt that at this time that the ‘Scuds’ were under the direct operational control of the Soviets, who conducted all fire missions.” But it isn’t apparent whether unused missiles might have been left with the Afghan military after the abrupt withdrawal of the “advisers,” which Bermudez dates to November 1991. Regardless, this wasn’t the actual subject of the paper, so even including all 1,660 SSMs wouldn’t have changed any of its conclusions. Although it would interfere with claims like “40% of Missiles in Developing World Came from N.Korea.”

I’ll let Jeffrey tackle the question of whether any deliveries are missing from the China column.

On a Personal Note

Thanks to those who made it possible to do this research and to present it. Thanks also to the voters who picked my article as the winner of the first online reader survey at the Nonproliferation Review. However much other recent evidence might suggest otherwise, democracy clearly is the best system.

Update. See also “North Korea’s Shrinking Role in the Global Missile Market,” now live at 38North.org. It details recent interceptions of arms shipments from North Korea, discusses Burma’s apparent emergence as a new customer, and identifies new ballistic missile suppliers, actual or potential.

Late Update. “Missile control: A multi-decade experiment in nonproliferation,” is now live at TheBulletin.org. It builds on this research to uncover what has worked to stop missile proliferation, what hasn’t, and what lessons could be drawn from that for related challenges.

Another Update | Sept. 1, 2011. FAS has just posted a complete run of the Grimmett reports from 1982 through 2010. Now you can roll your own version of Table 1, if you like.

At one point in a wide-ranging op-ed back in March, Frank von Hippel made the case for a global switchover to multinational consortia for uranium enrichment:

[It] would make it more difficult for any one country to divert the material to military ends. In fact, Urenco, the West’s most successful uranium enrichment enterprise, is already under the joint ownership of Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.

The United States should help shape this industrial model into an international one, in which all enrichment plants are under multinational control. Doing so would make it more difficult for countries like Iran to justify building national enrichment plants that could be used to produce nuclear weapons materials.

The attractions of the proposal are clear enough, in principle – much broader access to state-of-the-art technology without the proliferation risks involved in national fuel cycles. But offering URENCO as an example of how to do it rings false.

Really, has there been a bigger disaster for nonproliferation? Brazil, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea, and probably others have been the unintended beneficiaries of URENCO centrifuge technology. Perhaps Dutch and German engineers needed their own ISTC years before it was established for the benefit of Russian scientists.

And lest you think it’s just a URENCO problem, consider where North Korea got its reprocessing technology: the defunct Eurochemic consortium based in Belgium. That seems less like a URENCO-style case of massive and recurring intellectual property theft, and more like a giveaway. According to Mark Hibbs in the Feb. 28, 1994 issue of NuclearFuel,

As early as 1970, in open IAEA publications and in so-called external technical reports (ETR), Eurochemic made public schematic blueprints for plant construction, flow charts for process engineering, and operations results. ‘There was no secret about this work,’ an official at KFK [the Nuclear Research Center at Karlsruhe] said.”

The multinational approach remains an attractive idea, on paper. But work remains to be done to establish why it has gone so wrong in the past, and what could be done to prevent similar episodes in the future.

No one knows where Japan’s ongoing nuclear disaster will end. The current signs are ominous. We can only hope that the spent-fuel ponds can be prevented from boiling off. In the meantime, we can try to draw out some of the implications of the event. I’ve attempted that in my latest Bulletin column.

The first and simplest point is that Fukushima is both the first nuclear disaster resulting from a natural disaster and the first serious failure of multiple reactors at once. These observations are related. Every other serious event – Windscale, TMI, Chernobyl, etc. – was a one-off caused by internal failures of some sort. What’s happening in Japan isn’t the same at all; this is a natural disaster that has cascaded into a hydra-headed technological disaster.

A compound event isn’t so unusual in itself, although we sometimes don’t fully register them, preferring for some reason to emphasize the “natural” part of what are really natural-technological disasters. Just to pick one example: the inundation of a major city in 2005 gets shorthanded as “Hurricane Katrina,” and not as “The Great New Orleans Multi-Point Levy Failure.”

All Together Now

Group failures are unlikely to happen by sheer chance. Lightning rarely hits two houses next to each other on the same night. It’s more likely that a single wildfire will engulf both of them. This phenomenon is known to statisticians as “tail dependence.” This paper defines tail dependence as “the tendency of dependence between two random variables to concentrate in the extreme values… such that severe losses are more likely to happen together.”

In other words, there are situations that cause everything to crash at once. As the homely proverb has it, “It never rains but it pours.” Anyone living in the PEPCO service area will understand.

That’s a real problem for nuclear power that has perhaps not been adequately recognized. Extreme events may be rare in any given spot, but from a global and multi-decade perspective, they’re more common. Disasters will happen. As a result, some will argue that nuclear power should be abandoned; others will argue that we can live with the risks. But these are the same arguments as ever, really. Reactors will continue to be built, but existing levels of safety won’t suffice.

Previous experience may teach us something about multi-decade efforts to manage catastrophic risks. Insurance companies have known since the 19^th century not to insure properties next door to each other, and not to write too many policies in any single city (back in the days before asbestos insulation, when entire cities could and did burn up). It’s reasonable to ask now whether the next generation of nuclear power plants should be quite so bunched up, where the same natural disaster can clobber several of them at once.

Update | March 25, 2011. In the Washington Post, David Nakamura and Chico Harlan describe the vain efforts of seismologist Yukinobu Okamura to get NISA and TEPCO to understand the implications of the year 869 earthquake discussed in my latest Bulletin column and in the comments here.

After a few years of activity, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe of Syria’s nuclear activities is sputtering to a halt. To their credit, even after the being denied access to sites apparently linked to the concealed reactor destroyed by the Israeli Air Force – and having had very little access to the former reactor site itself – safeguards inspectors have still managed to unearth undeclared nuclear imports and experiments. But that run of success now appears to have ended.

The international investigation has suffered from two burdens: first, a late start, and second, the limits of the IAEA’s authority in Syria. Despite extensive news reports of the destruction of a hidden reactor in September 2007, the IAEA failed to act until April 2008, on the dubious grounds that no member state had shared its suspicions until then. In the intervening time, Syria was able to remove or bury the rubble. The inspectors also sought access to three allegedly related locations, but were denied on the irrelevant grounds that these were military facilities. In the meantime, Syria had the opportunity to sanitize these sites as well.

Phosphate, Irradiate, Obfuscate

Only where the inspectors have had regular access have they managed to unravel Syria’s cover stories. Environmental samples taken in August 2008 at a safeguarded nuclear research site in Damascus, the Miniature Neutron Source Reactor (MNSR), revealed traces of uranium in hot cells. After the IAEA rejected Syria’s initial explanations, the Syrians admitted to having imported small amounts of previously undeclared uranyl nitrate, as well as having introduced domestically produced yellowcake into the facility. When the IAEA conducted an inventory at MNSR in March 2010, the Syrians also acknowledged having converted yellowcake to uranyl nitrate and undertaken irradiation experiments, all without informing the IAEA as required by Syria’s nuclear safeguards agreement. According to the Syrian side, the yellowcake came from a phosphate purification facility near the city of Homs, built by a Swedish engineering firm as an IAEA-sponsored Technical Cooperation project.

At last report, the IAEA believes that other undeclared uranium conversion experiments have taken place in Syria, and that Syria has yet to declare its entire uranium stockpile. Syria has refused the IAEA’s request to visit the Homs facility.

Once Bitten

The IAEA is unlikely to make additional headway under its present authorities in Syria. These do not include an Additional Protocol, which would afford inspectors wide-ranging access. Although Director-General Amano has declined to rule it out, the IAEA looks reluctant to use even its existing special-inspection authority. Invoking a special inspection backfired with the North Koreans almost two decades ago, so it’s perhaps understandable if the IAEA has become gun-shy.

Instead of taking a confrontational approach, the IAEA concluded a “plan of action” with Damascus on September 3, 2010 to resolve certain “inconsistencies” between Syrian statements and IAEA findings – an approach reminiscent of the ill-fated Iranian work plan of 2007. So far, it’s been more plan than action. On November 18, Amano sent a letter directly to the Syrian Foreign Minister urging full cooperation. (Previous correspondence, as best as I can tell, went to the Atomic Energy Commission of Syria.) The only reply seems to have been the remarks of President Bashar al-Asad, who told an interviewer that Syria will never sign an Additional Protocol.

Start Spreading the News

The Syrian case now lumbers on to its destination. David Crawford of Wall Street Journal has reported what many of us had suspected would soon be coming: the IAEA is preparing to draw conclusions about Syria’s noncompliance with its safeguards agreement. Subject to a vote of the Board of Governors, which could take place as soon as next month, Syria’s nuclear program is poised to land on the docket of the UN Security Council.

Recent and related: Syria’s Tibnah Salt Mine Revisited, and Did Syria Admit to Bio-Weapons?

Update | March 7, 2011. The IAEA’s latest Syria report conveys no sense whatsoever that the Director-General is pushing for a decision on noncompliance, so I’d have to say that Crawford’s story was… premature. Andreas Persbo has posted an analysis of the special inspection power and how its invocation might lead to a noncompliance finding. Mark Hibbs reports that the lack of urgency surrounding Syria’s case is owed to other priorities, particularly a hope that Syria might soon commence peace talks with Israel.

Stay tuned.

One of the more important questions about Syria’s nuclear program has got to be, Just where is it, anyway? Those of us who were initially skeptical of reports that the Dayr al-Zawr facility had been a reactor could point to the almost complete absence of ancillary buildings at the site. Where would fresh fuel be produced and stored? Where would spent fuel go? What about reprocessing facilities? And waste sites? And so on.  So it caught many eyes when GOV/2008/60, the IAEA’s first safeguards report on Syria, mentioned “three other locations alleged by some Member States to be of relevance” where “landscaping activities and the removal of large containers took place shortly after the Agency’s request for access.”

On December 1, David Albright and Paul Brannan of ISIS published a short report mentioning locations near Masyaf and Iskandariya, both in the vicinity of Hama, and Marj as-Sultan, close to Damascus. The authors also mention a fourth site that has attracted the IAEA’s interest. They don’t name it, but we can make an educated guess: the Tibnah (or Tibni) salt mine at 35° 33′ 07″N, 39° 48′ 38″E, about 17 km south of the former reactor site. (The mine appears in the overhead view to the right.)

As far as I’m aware, Andreas Persbo made the first public mention of Tibnah in connection with the reactor back in October 2008. Andreas observed that the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission had undertaken a “preliminary report” on whether the mine could be used to store radioactive waste, which would seem to make it a legitimate object of interest for nuclear safeguards. But it has yet to appear in any of the IAEA’s several reports on Syria.

Back to the Salt Mine

Lately, though, Tibnah has begun to creep back into view. In an October 2010 article in Jane’s Intelligence Review, former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley added a handful of pieces to the puzzle. The mine, he reports, is operated by the General Company for Phosphate and Mines (GECOPHAM), the same state-owned enterprise that operates the Homs Phosphate Fertilizer Plant, which removes uranium impurities from phosphates… thereby also producing yellowcake. He also cites the study mentioned previously by Persbo.

The document, titled, “Preliminary Report on General Setting of Tibni-Salt Mine for an Interim and Final Storage of Radioactive Waste in Syria,” happens to be in the IAEA’s collection. The abstract can be found online. The study was undertaken from May 1997 to May 1998. (The Principal Investigator was named as Mohssen Alimoussa of the Syrian Atomic Energy Agency; someone with the same name represented Syria’s oil ministry in this 2004 international meeting on environmental statistics.) The purpose envisioned for the site was described as “international radioactive waste disposal.”

As Kelley observes, the Tibnah study coincides with the initiation of Syrian-North Korean nuclear cooperation, which the U.S. intelligence community dates to 1997. Still more striking is the sharp drop in salt production in 2007, as seen in data available through 2008 from the U.S. Geological Survey. But at some time between 2004 and 2008, satellite photos show an expansion of activities at the site, not a contraction. Kelley suggests that the part of the mine may have been “pressed into service” to store debris from the reactor, thus becoming unavailable for salt production.

Even if not named by ISIS, Tibnah has become higher-profile lately. Most recently, it’s garnered a mention in the mass media (see the December 2 article about Syria and the IAEA by Paul-Anton Krueger in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung). Given the waste-disposal study submitted to the IAEA, not to mention the lack of a plausible military connection to an active salt mine — the excuse used by the Syrians to deny the IAEA access to the other three sites — there ought to be growing pressure on Damascus to grant access.

Update, Dec. 13, 7:26 pm. Based on a number of hints and suggestions received offline, it’s apparent that Tibnah is not the fourth site of interest to the IAEA.

Back on Nov. 28, Sen. Jon Kyl told Meet the Press that considerable time would be necessary to debate New START and offer multiple amendments to the resolution of ratification, a process that would “probably take at least two weeks.” John Isaacs now points out that 22 of Kyl’s Republican colleagues, led by Sen. John Ensign and Sen. Jim DeMint, have dispatched a letter to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell bearing a similar message: time for “numerous amendments” will be needed — time that won’t be available before the end of the year.

In response to these declarations, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov has threatened to counter with amendments of his own. But the point of announcing an intention to offer “numerous” amendments isn’t to change the treaty; it’s to protest bringing the treaty to the floor for debate in the first place. Perhaps it’s also a way of justifying a “no” vote on grounds of senatorial prerogative rather than (or in addition to) substance. But with New START gathering steam — especially since the appearance of the Dec. 2 op-ed by five Republican former Secretaries of State in the Washington Post – it’s likely to come to the floor regardless.

Star Wars Amendment: The Empire Strikes Back

But there presumably will be a few amendments offered in the time available. Going by the debate in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it’s possible that Sen. DeMint will reintroduce his missile defense amendment, which has been included in watered-down form in the resolution of ratification. DeMint later sought to incorporate his preferred missile defense language into the defense authorization bill, too. He seeks to require the rapid deployment of “an effective and layered missile defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States and its allies against all ballistic missile attacks,” i.e., including those from Russia.

As a policy, this would serve to antagonize Russia without bringing a single day closer the time that missile defenses could counteract Russia’s strategic forces. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice correctly observes in her own op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, the Russian nuclear arsenal “is far too sophisticated and large to be degraded by our missile defenses.”

In other respects, Rice’s message seems slightly off. Apparently calling for an amendment herself, she insists that the Senate “must make absolutely clear that in ratifying this treaty, the U.S. is not re-establishing the Cold War link between offensive forces and missile defenses.” In particular, she points to the treaty’s preamble and a Russian unilateral statement as potentially troublesome. But the resolution of ratification already does what Rice proposes, declaring that the treaty does not “limit in any way, and shall not be interpreted as limiting,” current or future defenses. It’s not clear what more she thinks might be necessary. Regardless, compared to some, Rice seems almost statesmanlike at the moment.

The Bottom Line

Perhaps it’s unreasonable or just plain naive to say so, but nuclear arms control ought to be above partisan politics, personal (dis)likes, ideological knee-jerks, or idle games of positioning. It’s a truism, but the fate of nations rests on how we handle the Bomb.

For further discussion, see my latest column in the Bulletin: The high stakes of New START.

As Michael has recently reminded us, the possession of nuclear weapons by two adversaries may lessen the chances of all-out war, but it does not prevent — and may even encourage — more limited forms of conflict. Western strategists have held this view since at least the 1950s, and lately have used it to explain the pattern of Indo-Pakistani clashes since the nuclear tests of 1998. (See The Stability-Instability Paradox, Nov. 2, 2010.)

The same phenomenon now appears to be at work on the Korean Peninsula.

In Korea as elsewhere, it’s not necessarily the more powerful actor that reaps the benefit of mutual nuclear deterrence. What Thomas Schelling defined as a competition in risk-taking mainly works in favor of those less averse to risk. That doesn’t mean that North Korea has been completely reckless; it simply means that Seoul and Washington have been more cautious. Before the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island last week, and even before the sinking of the ROK ship Cheonan off Baeknyeong Island in March, KPA artillery units had started to fire occasional barrages in the direction of the islands, testing South Korean tolerance by small steps. As the Chosun Ilbo observes, the shelling fell on the northern side of the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in January, then south of the NLL in August. Neither incident garnered more than a verbal response. Now that the South Koreans have fired back — and say they will alter the rules of engagement in response to this incident — the North may well conclude it has started to discover the limits of Seoul’s tolerance.

The Role of Nuclear Weapons

Some maintain that by holding Seoul hostage to artillery fire, North Korea has long had the political or functional equivalent of the Bomb. That might explain some of its aggressiveness in the military incidents and bombings of the 1960s through the 1980s. But in hindsight, perhaps this factor has never really loomed so large in Pyongyang’s own thinking. As Victor Cha pointed out at an Aug. 31, 2010 talk at CSIS, the long gap between the Cheonan and the massacres of yore suggests that something important has changed lately, and that something seems to have been the second, more successful nuclear test.

We might also ask what changed in the late 1980s. Why, a full decade before the onset of the Sunshine Policy (ca. 1998), did North Korea stop trying to assassinate South Korean leaders, blow up airliners, or attack American military ships or planes? And why was it necessary to test a couple of nuclear devices before reverting to the bad habits of yesteryear? The answers aren’t clear, but a couple of points stand out.

First, without a nuclear-armed superpower ally behind them, North Korean leaders may have hesitated to act too provocatively, even with the advantage of having Seoul under the gun. Second, in the Sunshine period, they had little incentive to behave that way. Only after North-South relations had entered their downturn (ca. 2008), and only after North Korea had the Bomb (ca. 2009) would this sort of behavior seemed at all attractive.  We needn’t even invoke the succession or other special factors to explain it — this is the historic norm for North Korean conduct toward the South.

The D-word

So why did North Korea start performing nuclear tests during the era of good feelings (comparatively speaking)? One answer is, possessing a demonstrated nuclear capability was seen to protect against regime change. The shift in Kim Jong Il’s thinking can be seen rather plainly in a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) statement that appeared in KCNA on April 6, 2003, when North Korea suddenly embraced the doctrine of deterrence wholesale:

Only the physical deterrent force, tremendous military deterrent force powerful enough to decisively beat back an attack supported by any ultra-modern weapons, can avert a war and protect the security of the country and the nation. This is a lesson drawn from the Iraqi war.

The U.S is seriously mistaken if it thinks that the DPRK will accept the demand for disarming while watching one of the three countries the U.S. listed as part of an “axis of evil” already subject to the barbarous military attack.

Before then, deterrence was just a Yankee imperialist shibboleth that KCNA mentioned only to sneer at.

April 6, 2003 is also just about when it became plain that the 3rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army was meeting no serious resistance on the doorstep of Baghdad. North Korean leaders have always paid close attention to distant military events, as Joe Bermudez convincingly shows in the latest issue of KPA Journal. And — as noted in the MFA statement itself — it scarcely could have escaped Kim Jong Il’s attention that he was a charter member of the Axis of Evil. Thus, when North Korea announced its first nuclear test in October 2006, it called the event “the new measure to be taken to bolster the war deterrent for self-defence.”

But as an amulet against regime change, a nuclear deterrent cuts both ways; it protects a regime whether it’s defensively minded or inclined to aggression — at least on a limited scale.

Most Western experts don’t assume that the North Korean military actually has nuclear warheads small enough to place on its missiles. But the shelling of Baeknyeong suggests either that it does, or that Pyongyang is engaged in one great bluff.

To place a new nuclear facility at Yongbyon is to prepare it for exhibition. Nothing else makes that point as well as the easily overlooked third new building mentioned in Sig Hecker’s latest trip report, after the light-water reactor (LWR) and the gas centrifuge enrichment plant (GCEP): “the new three-story Guest House.” Decoded, the message reads: Come visit Yongbyon, where sanctions aren’t working.

The exact placement of the GCEP and the LWR-in-progress contain a message of their own. First, as a recent DigitalGlobe image shows, the LWR construction site occupies the area of the disabled 5 MW(e) Magnox reactor’s former cooling tower.  (See the ISIS image brief.) Second, as Jeffrey points out, the GCEP stands on the site of the Magnox reactor’s fuel-fabrication building. As I’ve written in a contribution to the current issue of Uranium Intelligence Weekly, these changes almost certainly would not prevent restoration of the reactor to operational status, but they do convey that making plutonium at Yongbyon no longer rates as a high priority.

In fact, these look like the very sort of additional and unilateral disablement steps that I had deemed so unlikely earlier. (Whoops.) It’s the sort of action that one might expect North Korea to take in order to signal confidence that it already has all the plutonium it needs.

Naturally, skeptics will question the North Koreans’ statements, described in Hecker’s report, that the new facilities are meant to produce electricity only, and not new weapons made with highly enriched uranium (HEU). Those inclined to brooding may reflect on reports that a new tunnel is being dug at the nuclear test site near Punggye-ri, and wonder if this has any connection to threats from July to “bolster [North Korea's] nuclear deterrent in a more diversified manner.” Still, I’m not betting on the testing of an HEU device — at least, not quite so soon after the responsible parties have sworn up and down that it’s all just for making electricity.

What Sort of Centrifuges? How Powerful?

For the time being, my UIW piece remains behind the paywall. If you have access, you might find it interesting for its discussion of the potential characteristics of the machines glimpsed by Hecker and colleagues. The leading hypothesis is that they’re P-2 machines whose design was provided by A.Q. Khan. What makes that particularly interesting is that the Iranians aren’t known to have operated their own P-2 derivatives, the IR-2 and IR-2m, in groups of more than 10. [Update, Nov. 23: Make that "more than 20," per the latest Iran report.]

The P-2 is a significantly better device than the P-1 or its Iranian counterpart, the IR-1. Hecker reports two important claims: first, that the North Korean facility contains about 2,000 machines; and second, that it is capable of producing 8,000 kg SWU/yr.  That may be exaggeration or wishful thinking. Then again, based on Mark Hibbs’s past reporting, the German G-2 centrifuge — the basis of Pakistan’s P-2 — was capable of 5 kg SWU/yr. per machine.

Compared to what Iran’s IR-1 has done over most of the course of its recent career, that’s a much more powerful centrifuge. Perhaps we ought to add another item to the list of reasons not to underestimate North Korea.

Update, Nov. 23: According to Dr. Hecker, the new developments at Yongbyon would not significantly interfere with restoration of the 5 MW(e) reactor, if desired. It could be restarted in about six months.

Note:  This post appears in both Russian and English (after the jump).

В недавнeй статье в блоге радиостанции Эхо Москвы и в заявлениях прессе, председатель комитета по международным делам Госдумы РФ Константин Косачев выразил озабоченность по поводу текста резолюции совета и согласия на ратификацию договора СНВ-3 (Resolution of Advice and Consent to Ratification for the New START Treaty), принятой в сентябре комитетом по международным делам Сената США. Особенно озаботили г-на Косачева три «понимания» в заключение текста резолюции, которые истолковывают некоторые пункты договора. По этой причине он предложил, чтобы комитеты Госдумы пересмотрели свою прежнюю безоговорочную поддержку договора.

Выпуск дуэлирующих интерпретаций СНВ-3 российскими и американскими законодателями или наложение новых условий на вход в силу договора стали бы досадными событиями. Подобная динамика явилась причиной невозможности ратификации договора СНВ-2 в 1990-х гг.

Стоить отметить, что три понимания твердо придерживаются рамкам договора. Это становится заметно не сразу, потому что их официального перевода не существует и потому что их текст запутан. В особой степени это относится к третьему пониманию. Оно гласит, что «будущие стратегические неядерные системы вооружения, которые иначе не попадают под определения договора СНВ-3 не будут представлять из себя «новых типов стратегических наступательных систем вооружения» подлежащих договору СНВ-3». Важными здесь являются слова «иначе не (попадают)» (“do not otherwise”). Будущие стратегические неядерные системы вооружения, которые попадают под определения в СНВ-3— особенно баллистические ракеты—будут попадать под ограничения по договору. Другие системы вооружения будущего, несуществующие сегодня, договор не затронул.

Стоит подчеркнуть, что эти три понимания, составленные с особой тщательностью, не меняют смысла СНВ-3. Их задача заключается в том, чтобы навязать Президенту США узкое толкование некоторых пунктов договора. Даже если они не являются великодушными, они не должны являться причиной излишнего беспокойства в Москве.

What the Senate’s New START Resolution Says

In a blog post and in comments to the media, Konstantin Kosachyov, who chairs the international affairs committee of Russia’s State Duma, has expressed concern about the Resolution of Advice and Consent to Ratification for the New START Treaty approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September. [Here's an English-language account.] Mr. Kosachyov is particularly concerned about three “understandings” at the end of the text, which interpret certain aspects of the treaty. For this reason, he proposes that the State Duma’s international affairs and defense committees reconsider their previous unconditional endorsements of the treaty.

It would be very unfortunate if the Russian and American legislatures started issuing dueling interpretations of New START or if either side imposed new conditions on its entry into force. This dynamic effectively undid START II in the 1990s.

It should be noted that the three understandings adhere closely to the letter of the treaty. This is not readily apparent because there is no official Russian text of the understandings, and because the language of the understandings is convoluted. In particular, the third understanding could not be more confusing. It declares that “future, strategic-range non-nuclear weapon systems that do not otherwise meet the definitions of the New START Treaty will not be ‘new kinds of strategic offensive arms’ subject to the New START Treaty.” The important words here are “do not otherwise.” Future, strategic-range non-nuclear weapons systems that do meet the definitions of the New START Treaty – ballistic missiles, to be specific – will be subject to the limits of the treaty. Other future weapons systems, which do not exist today, have not been addressed in the Treaty.

It bears emphasizing that the three understandings, which have been drafted with great care, do not alter the meaning of New START. The understandings aim to force a narrow reading of certain aspects of the treaty upon the American President. While they are not overly generous in spirit, they should not be a source of unnecessary alarm in Moscow.

A special thanks to Anya Loukianova of the University of Maryland for translating this post into Russian.

(See a related post.)