Red-Handed

DEAD TO RIGHTS

Mitchell B. Reiss and Robert L. Gallucci

As individuals who have negotiated with North Korea and are well versed in the development of Pyongyang's nuclear programs through our service in the Clinton and Bush administrations, we feel compelled to comment on Selig Harrison's "Did North Korea Cheat?" (January/February 2005) in order to clarify a number of the misstatements and misunderstandings in Harrison's article. The most serious of his allegations are that the Bush administration has politicized the question of North Korea's uranium-enrichment program; that U.S. allies and partners in the six-party talks do not share Washington's assessment of that program; and that the enrichment program is somehow not central to resolving the nuclear challenge Pyongyang poses to its neighbors and the world.

The United States, for a number of years, has had well-founded suspicions that North Korea has been working on the enrichment of uranium. Indeed, in both 1999 and 2000, the Clinton administration was unable to certify to Congress that North Korea was not pursuing a uranium-enrichment capability. (This fact alone should dispel claims of partisanship on this point.) In mid-2002, the Bush administration obtained clear evidence that North Korea had acquired material and equipment for a centrifuge facility that, when complete, could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year.

Harrison asserts that North Korea could not have financially afforded such items. He is mistaken. North Korea has more than enough funds; indeed, the revenue Pyongyang gets from its illicit activities (currency counterfeiting, narcotics smuggling, and cigarette pirating) alone nets it hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Although there is a great deal of information in the public domain about North Korea's enrichment activities, two points are particularly worth noting. First, as the news media have reported, Abdul Qadeer Khan (who ran a black-market nuclear supply ring from Pakistan) has confessed to providing North Korea with centrifuge prototypes and blueprints, which enabled Pyongyang to begin its centrifuge enrichment program. North Korea's decision, apparently reached in 2000, to begin acquiring materials in larger quantities for a uranium-enrichment facility with several thousand centrifuges suggests that its R&D-level enrichment endeavors have been successful. Likewise, its procurement of equipment suitable for use in uranium hexafluoride feed and withdrawal systems also points to planning for a uranium-enrichment facility. Pyongyang has yet to address these points and denies the existence of uranium-enrichment activities of any kind.

Second, in April 2003, French, German, and Egyptian authorities intercepted a 22-ton shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes acquired for North Korea by a German firm. In November of that year, a representative from Urenco, the European uranium-enrichment consortium, testified in a German court that the dimensions of those tubes--which were intercepted en route to North Korea--matched the technical requirements for vacuum casings for a Urenco centrifuge. A German newspaper reported that North Korea had attempted to circumvent German, and presumably Chinese, export controls by claiming that the tubes were intended for a Chinese company, Shenyang Aircraft Corporation. It is particularly noteworthy that the specifications for the German aluminum tubes are essentially identical to those used by a Malaysian company in manufacturing outer centrifuge casings for Libya's formerly clandestine gas-centrifuge uranium-enrichment program. Details on those tubes were publicized in the February 2004 press release issued by the Malaysian Inspector-General of Police.

Notwithstanding this accumulation of evidence in the public record, could it still be possible, as Harrison argues, that all of this activity was directed solely at achieving a low-enriched uranium (LEU) capability? Hardly. Harrison's speculation is based on a fundamental misstatement of the technology involved. It is not "much easier" to make LEU than it is to make highly enriched uranium (HEU), as Harrison claims. It typically takes three times as much separative work to enrich uranium from its natural state to 5 percent LEU than it does to enrich LEU to 90 percent HEU. It also makes little economic and technical sense to assert, as Harrison does, that North Korea was planning to produce LEU fuel for the light-water reactors it anticipated getting from the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) under the 1994 deal Pyongyang had struck with Washington. KEDO was committed to assisting North Korea in securing a foreign supply of reactor fuel, making it unnecessary for North Korea to undertake the expensive process of domestic LEU production. Moreover, Pyongyang would also have had to construct specialized fuel-fabrication facilities keyed to particular specifications, which North Korea did not possess, for the far-from-complete light-water reactors.

Harrison also argues that North Korea lacks the capability to produce enough electricity for a "multi-centrifuge" uranium-enrichment facility. This is not correct. Unlike the gaseous-diffusion plants the United States constructed during the Manhattan Project, enrichment plants using Urenco-type centrifuges are not significant consumers of electrical power. The same electricity-generating facilities used for normal commercial operations are more than adequate to power gas-centrifuge operations.