Why N. Korea Talks Matter So Much

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By J. Peter Scoblic, J. Peter Scoblic is executive editor of the New Republic.

George W. Bush and John Kerry spent more than 10 minutes of their 90-minute debate last week discussing nuclear nonproliferation — chiefly what to do about North Korea. Moderator Jim Lehrer thought the contrast in the candidates' positions toward Pyongyang was important enough to clarify them himself: "I want to make sure … the people watching understand the differences between the two of you on this. You want to continue the multinational talks, correct?"

"Right," said Bush.

When Kerry said he would like to see bilateral talks, Bush said: "I can't tell you how big a mistake I think that is."

Despite Lehrer's good intentions, to most viewers this exchange probably had all the import of a Tastes Great-Less Filling debate, with none of the clarity. But, in truth, the bilateral-versus-multilateral divide is extremely important and telling — and could make the difference between a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and a nuclear-ravaged American city.

U.S. relations with Pyongyang started to unravel two years ago when North Korea admitted having a secret program to enrich uranium, which, like plutonium, can be used to make an atom bomb. This violated a 1994 Clinton administration agreement that froze North Korea's known plutonium-producing facilities, including 8,000 used fuel rods from a reactor, and placed them under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In return, the United States agreed to build two light-water reactors for North Korea and supply it with tons of heating oil in the interim.

Conservatives never liked this deal. To them, paying off a dictator smacked of appeasement. That North Korea then cheated only proved to them the fecklessness of negotiating with tyrants. And so, when North Korea admitted having the uranium program, sparking a new nuclear crisis, Bush's priority was to avoid doing anything Clinton-like.

Initially, this meant not meeting with the North Koreans at all. When he did agree to allow meetings, it was not to negotiate but to talk about how North Korea could meet its international commitments. And, when the two sides did talk, he refused to do so alone because that is what President Clinton had done. Hence, the multilateral talks, which also include Russia, China, South Korea and Japan.

A year and a half later, however, these talks have made little progress, and the situation has gone from bad to worse. In addition to the uranium program, North Korea has reprocessed the rods frozen by the Clinton agreement, providing Pyongyang with enough plutonium for half a dozen nuclear weapons. Worse, we don't know where the plutonium is. North Korea has a long history of exporting dangerous technology to dangerous people, and it's frighteningly plausible that it might sell the plutonium to a terrorist group.

To have allowed North Korea to reprocess the fuel rods is a policy failure of enormous proportions (remember, we invaded Iraq because we thought it might be able to do something like this years from now), yet the Bush administration cheerily claims that the mere existence of the multilateral talks demonstrates the success of its North Korea policy.

Bush maintains that only a multilateral agreement will prevent Kim Jong Il from cheating again, neglecting the fact that North Korea has turned its back on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which, with 187 signatories, is the granddaddy of multilateral agreements. And Bush claims that if we meet one on one with the North Koreans, the Chinese will drop out of the process, neglecting the fact that China — which wields enormous influence over Pyongyang — has wanted us to meet directly with North Korea since this crisis started.

Indeed, in his obsessive Clinton avoidance, the president seems to have confused means and ends. Whereas with regard to Iraq, Bush said during the debate that "we change tactics when we need to, but we never change our … strategic beliefs," his North Korea policy seems to be the opposite: Our tactics are inviolable, but our strategic beliefs — like the belief that it's a bad idea to let proliferating dictators get nuclear weapons — are malleable.

Would bilateral talks really make a difference? Well, the North Koreans have always wanted them, and that alone is likely to accelerate negotiation of a deal. The flexibility that bilateral talks can provide is invaluable. Not everything has to be decided by committee; individual negotiators can meet and bounce ideas off each other.

It's also important for the United States to be able to make its position clearly and directly to the North Koreans — without the involvement of the Chinese, who do not necessarily share our interests. Finally, the North Koreans are more likely to detail their uranium program (and thus the extent of their cheating) in front of one country than five.

Kerry's support of bilateral talks is laudable for all these reasons. But, beyond the tactical advantages, Kerry's willingness to sit down with the North Koreans suggests he's comfortable engaging them without fear that any deal he reaches would look like appeasement. He seems to understand that the key is to get North Korea's plutonium back under control and that, when it comes to stopping proliferation, there are no points for style.

As Dan Poneman, who helped negotiate the 1994 accord, told me, "If you want to solve a problem like this, you kind of gotta wrestle it to the ground." But you can't do that if, like Bush, you're afraid of getting dirty.

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Kamikaze Kerry
Should we really be accelerating Iran’s nuclear project?

By Henry Sokolski

In last week's presidential debate, John Kerry complained that the U.S. should have offered Iran's mullahs lightly enriched uranium to "test" whether they "were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes." Although his suggestion seemed odd — Iran, after all, is suspected of trying to enrich uranium to make bombs — it has so far received scant attention. But closer look at the idea should set off alarm bells.

Under almost any scenario, implementing Kerry's proposal would not only bring Iran closer to having a bomb, it would also help Iran get a large arsenal — two things the U.S. and its allies are rightly eager to prevent.

Many people, of course, would like to believe that the security risks presented by Iran's nearly completed light-water power reactor at Bushehr are manageable. The key challenge, they argue, is to get Tehran to forgo commercially producing the weapons-usable reactor fuels — enriched uranium and separated plutonium — that Iranian officials insist they have the right to make in order to fuel Bushehr.

One would do well to challenge this assertion, which Iran's mullahs base on a cynical manipulation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's (NPT) endorsement of peaceful nuclear energy. The NPT is designed to prevent nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. Nowhere does it mention either enrichment or reprocessing, and rightly so: These nuclear activities are grossly uneconomical for nations like Iran and can bring states within days of having a large stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Rather than confront Iran on these points, Kerry's campaign has already ceded them. His website actually maintains that the NPT allows such activities and that, as such, new deals such as the one he proposes for Iran are necessary and desirable not just for Tehran, but for North Korea and other would-be bomb makers as well. Such looseness with the NPT is worrisome. What's worse is that Kerry's proposed fix — offering states such as Iran fresh reactor fuel in exchange for assurances that they will hand over their plutonium-laden spent fuel and forgo enrichment and reprocessing — is spring-loaded to compound our proliferation worries.

First, as a string of nuclear-intelligence surprises have demonstrated with Libya, North and South Korea, Algeria, Iraq, and Iran, assuming you can verify a nation's NPT pledges is a sure-fire prescription for embarrassment. Despite intensified U.S. and allied intelligence efforts and the much-improved inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), states' covert efforts to produce weapons-usable plutonium and uranium have proceeded for years without being discovered. With recent revelations that the father of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program developed and sold key nuclear-weapons technology and hardware for years through entities from over 30 countries, the threat that additional states might succeed at covert nuclear activities has only increased.

Second and directly related to this point, it is a mistake to assume, as Kerry does, that light-water reactors are sufficiently "proliferation resistant" to be entrusted to virtually anyone (including Iran and North Korea) so long as there are no accompanying commercial enrichment or reprocessing activities.

Last week, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, which I direct, released a two-year study, "A Fresh Examination of the Proliferation Dangers of Light Water Reactors," authored by three national authorities on power reactors, atomic-weapons design, and nuclear chemistry. A key conclusion of this report is that a country can reduce the level of effort needed to produce a bomb five-fold simply by using fresh light-water-reactor fuel rather than natural uranium to feed its uranium-enrichment plants.

In Iran's case, this is significant. Earlier this year, Tehran was reported to be assembling the parts necessary to build 1,000 uranium-enrichment centrifuges. We don't know whether it has completed these machines or where they all might be. Assuming for argument's sake that the work was done and that the machines were hidden away, even a five-fold reduction in its production effort would mean Iran could have its first bomb not sometime in early 2006 but this year in time for Christmas.

Could Iran divert fresh fuel for this purpose? The short answer is yes. About enough fresh fuel to make 30 crude bombs' worth of weapons uranium is normally must be kept at the ready at a reactor site for safety reasons. IAEA inspectors, meanwhile, account for this fuel only once every twelve months. One could surely keep better tabs on the fuel than this, but even if one did and detected a diversion, the question would remain: What would one do?

As for Kerry's other idea of taking back spent fuel from the power reactor to keep Iran from extracting the weapons-usable plutonium it contains, this too ignores several stubborn facts. For starters, spent fuel is so radioactive when it first leaves the reactor that it's dangerous to move it over long distances until after it has had some months to cool off in wet storage ponds. During this cooling period, however, a country could divert the material to strip out the plutonium locally without undue hazard if it did so quickly. Because the IAEA only examines its spent-fuel-inspection camera footage every three months, there's a good chance Iran could pinch the fuel without being found out.
What's worse, even if the diversion was detected, it would almost certainly come too late. As the aforementioned study makes clear, a nation could secretly build a small reprocessing plant and have it ready to make the first bomb's worth of plutonium only a few days after receiving its first delivery of spent fuel. According to published nuclear-industry and national-laboratory design studies, relatively high-output reprocessing plants could be built in a space as small as 65 square feet. As for the quality of the plutonium these plants could extract, it would be nearly weapons-grade and could be relied on to build bombs as destructive as that dropped on Hiroshima. Finally, and perhaps most chilling, after the first 15 months of operation, Iran would have enough spent fuel from Bushehr to produce nearly 60 of these weapons.

What does all this suggest? Letting Iran keep its light-water reactor and giving it fresh reactor fuel might well smoke out Tehran's nuclear intentions but only at the risk of accelerating its bomb project. Certainly, if giving Iran a leg up in covertly making bomb material is the kind of "sound judgment" Kerry believes our next president should exercise, we are all in for a rough ride. Bush, in contrast, believes we should get the U.N. Security Council to censure Iran so Bushehr is not completed. This idea seems far less flashy, but unlike Kerry's proposal it gets to the real problem, which is not any uncertainty regarding Iran's peaceful intentions but rather its clear bent for bombs. This is where any sound policy must start.

— Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C., and editor of Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions with Patrick Clawson.