Red-Handed
Harrison also asserts that the Bush administration has not made a "credible case" to Congress or to U.S. partners in the six-party talks. In fact, the case has been made and is credible. In both open and closed sessions, the intelligence community has briefed Congress on the evidence concerning North Korea's uranium-enrichment program. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, and other officials involved in the negotiating process also have frequently briefed Congress on this issue.
Furthermore, the United States has shared information with all of its partners in the six-party talks concerning North Korea's uranium-enrichment program. And the United States' partners have reciprocated, sharing information they have acquired from their own sources on North Korea's enrichment activities.
Of most concern in Harrison's article is his position that somehow North Korea's uranium-enrichment program is a secondary or tangential issue, so minor that it should be put aside in the interest of negotiating a rollback of North Korea's plutonium-based nuclear weapons program. He discounts the fact that the enrichment program is a clear violation of North Korea's international commitments under the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), North Korea's safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the 1994 Agreed Framework, and the 1991 North-South Denuclearization Declaration; he is attempting to make a distinction between "good" cheating and "bad" cheating. Pyongyang's dismal record demonstrates both the centrality of the uranium-enrichment issue to the six-party process and the need to ensure that any solution to the North Korean nuclear issue is thorough and verifiable.
The United States and its partners in the six-party talks are not willing to negotiate over part of North Korea's nuclear-weapons program while leaving Pyongyang in possession of the capability to continue its nuclear weapons effort. To focus solely on the more visible plutonium program would mean turning a blind eye to a parallel program that has the potential to provide North Korea with a covert, steady supply of fissile material for the fabrication of nuclear weapons or export to terrorist groups.
The United States and its partners have been waiting for months for North Korean officials to return to Beijing to engage in serious negotiations and follow up what all other parties had believed to be a productive third round of talks. Washington awaits Pyongyang's formal response to the offer the United States placed on the table last June, as well as the ideas tabled by South Korea and other countries. To start a new relationship, North Korea must forswear its nuclear ambitions, and the six-party talks offer the best opportunity for resolving this issue through peaceful, multilateral diplomacy.
Harrison concludes that the U.S. objective should be, eventually, "to put the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle." We respectfully disagree. The U.S. goal should be to remove the nuclear bottle from North Korea entirely. And the time to do so is now.
Mitchell B. Reiss is Vice Provost of International Affairs at the College of William & Mary. From July 2003 to February 2005 he served as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Robert L. Gallucci is Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. From September 2000 to February 2005 he served as a member of the CIA's National Security Advisory Panel.
HEU DONE IT
Richard L. Garwin
Selig Harrison argues that "it is much easier to make low-enriched uranium (LEU)--the fuel needed to power light-water plutonium reactors--than it is to make weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU), as Washington has accused Pyongyang of doing." In fact, the centrifuge method is as easily used for producing HEU (nominally 95 percent U-235) as it is for making LEU (typically 4.4 percent U-235 in U-238). The performance of a gas centrifuge is measured by its yield of separative work units (SWU). Each of the centrifuges used in Pakistan or in the European enrichment enterprise, Urenco, may be assumed to produce about 3 SWU per year. The commercial nuclear-fuel market values an SWU at about $100. Technically, the number of SWU that would normally be used to produce a kilogram of U-235 as HEU (about 1.05 kg of HEU) is 232 SWU. The number of SWU that must be invested to make 1 kg of U-235 as LEU (in 22.7 kg of LEU) is about 151 SWU. In both cases one is assumed to start from natural uranium (0.711 percent U-235) and discard depleted uranium with 0.25 percent U-235.
