| A little over two weeks after North Korea shocked the world by admitting that it has a clandestine nuclear weapons acquisition programme, some more dismaying facts have come to light. The most stunning of these may be the world's first instance of the actual transfer, from one state to another, of advanced know-how to make nuclear weapons.
The North Korean programme in question is based on uranium enrichment, and is substantially different from the plutonium route the country pursued from the 1970s on, until it signed the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States. Under this agreement, Pyongyang agreed to close the plutonium reprocessing programme in return for the gift of two supposedly proliferation-proof 1,000 MW nuclear power reactors and for the supply of 500,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil a year.
This confession was not a tactical masterstroke calculated to embarrass an America preoccupied with Iraq. Rather, as Victor D. Cha, a Korea expert at Georgetown University in Washington, says: This was a case where Washington simply had the goods on them, and Pyongyang just didn t see any other way out.
Dear Leader Kim-Jong Il's confession was essentially a highly pragmatic response, and a way of telling the US that he is not addicted to terrorist means or excessive secrecy. Washington was embarrassed and withheld the information it had extracted for 12 days. It finally leaked it only in the dead of night.
North Korea has since tried to convert its weakness into strength. It now demands the US should sign a bilateral non-aggression treaty so that the security concerns of both sides could be addressed to promote peace on the Korean peninsula. To push this reasonable and realistic solution, North Korea has pugnaciously asserted its right to nuclear security in the face of the US's strategy for world supremacy, by saying the US has massively stockpiled nuclear weapons in its vicinity and threatened "a small country" [that is, itself].
Washington's immediate response has been to make diplomatic approaches to North Korea, not to threaten it with war and destruction. Secretary of State Colin Powell is scheduled to visit Seoul on Nov 10-12 where he will meet South Korean and Japanese officials to discuss the issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. The US has also taken up the issue with China.
Washington has again shown it adopts double standards: it is raring to wage a war on Iraq on the mere suspicion, speculation and surmise without reasonable or firm proof that it might have a programme to develop mass-destruction weapons, or might possess such weapons. But it has an altogether different approach to a state that admits it has run such a programme in breach of an agreement reached with the US!
Double standards apart, North Korea's diplomatic manoeuvre must be the world's most astounding exercise in audacious diplomacy. What Pyongyang is attempting to do is get the US to engage it out of desperation, with its economy in dire straits, and its regime isolated. Its means are unusual, if not outlandish. It says it feels threatened at being included in the Axis of Evil; targeting it, a fellow-member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which it has self-admittedly violated), is incompatible with the treaty's spirit!
This is breathtaking.
However, the most interesting and disturbing reports pertain to the provenance of North Korea's uranium enrichment programme, which it is unlikely to have developed on its own given the dire state of its economy and industry in the 1990s. There is growing speculation, corroborated by US and other intelligence, that the source is Pakistan.
For instance, Robert Einhorn, Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, told The Washington Post that North Korea and Pakistan have been known to engage in sensitive trade, including Pakistans purchase of Nodong missiles from North Korea "[C]oncerns were raised whether there was a quid pro quo in the form of enrichment technology."
The Nodong, it is generally believed, was acquired in the mid-1990s (1997?) and renamed Ghauri. The Ghauri has been repeatedly test-flown in Pakistan.
The New York Times too quotes intelligence officials as saying: What you have here is a perfect meeting of interests the North had what the Pakistanis needed and the Pakistanis had a way for Kim-Jong Il to restart a nuclear programme we had stopped.
A number of Indian intelligence sources too have confirmed the North Korea-Pakistan trade-off, partly based on the documents they found on board a North Korean ship which they intercepted in 1999 at an Indian port en route to Karachi from Pyongyang, carrying 170 tonnes of material suspected to be metal casings and missile components.
More recently, Joseph Cirincione, director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told India's Outlook magazine that it would be perfectly rational to assume |
