Proliferation
United in defiance
Feb 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The proliferation chain that links North Korea and Iran
AP
THE final frontier is being assaulted by a couple of troubling pioneers. North Korean officials are boasting that they will soon launch a rocket that will lift a communications satellite into space. With this defiant spectacular, they seem to be cocking a snook at America, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, who have been trying through six-party talks to curb North Korea’s equally vaunted nuclear-weapons efforts. Meanwhile, earlier in February, Iran—suspected of harbouring similar nuclear ambitions to North Korea’s, though it denies this—lifted its own small, supposedly home-made satellite into orbit too.
Both regimes trumpet their space prowess, and indeed such technological feats are not easy to achieve. But how do these “civilian” space efforts complement their terrestrial nuclear work? That is the question that deeply worries outsiders.
India showed the way: its supposedly civilian space programme sometimes won generous outside assistance, even as nuclear help was denied for fear of advancing its suspected weapons-building. As a result of the parallel effort, India now has missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads on targets not just throughout Pakistan, but deep inside China too. Quite simply, the technology needed to lift a satellite off the launch pad and shield it from damage on its way into space is indistinguishable from that needed to launch a far-flying nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.
North Korea and Iran appear to be following suit. Kim Jong Il’s regime claims to have first embarked on its space adventures in 1998, when it launched a Taepodong-1 rocket over an alarmed Japan, across the Pacific towards a startled America. Mr Kim even issued a stamp to celebrate what was said to have been the successful launch of a satellite that had since been warbling patriotic tunes back from space. Oddly, no one else ever picked up its signal. A failed missile test, concluded America, after watching the rocket plop down in the Pacific.
Whether the satellite was a figment of Mr Kim’s imagination hardly matters. The latest promised test-launch will violate resolution 1718, which bans North Korea from all such activity. This was passed by the United Nations Security Council in 2006, unusually with China’s backing, after North Korea first tried (but failed) to launch a still more capable missile and then conducted what is thought to have been its first nuclear test. Its determination now to carry on launching regardless has led to speculation in some quarters that the missile, assuming it launches successfully, could even be shot down by the new ballistic-missile defences that Japan and America have been frantically cobbling together to protect Japan from North Korea’s missile threats.
Mr Kim seems to be using his missile preparations to grab the attention of the new Obama administration in America, and to raise the ante in the six-party nuclear talks. These have been stalled for months because of North Korea’s refusal to accept proper verification of its nuclear programmes; that will remain the case—or so the other five parties suspect—until the regime in Pyongyang squeezes extra goodies out of the Americans.
The test, if it goes ahead, will also roughly coincide with an annual joint military exercise between America and South Korea, at a time when relations between South and North have deteriorated badly. The North Korean media claim, not for the first time, that the two Koreas are at “the brink of war”, and that America is preparing a pre-emptive strike against the North.
Certainly Mr Kim is determined to look as threatening as possible. Writing in the Washington Post on February 19th, Selig Harrison, who is a frequent visitor to North Korea, said that the foreign-ministry and defence officials he talked to recently had left him with the impression that North Korea’s stash of plutonium (which is exhibit-A in the six-party talks, though there are lingering concerns that Mr Kim has also dabbled in enriched uranium, another possible bomb ingredient) had already been “weaponised”—that is, converted into missile warheads.
If that is the case, then North Korea’s “satellite” test will be doubly alarming. Although the 2006 nuclear test was thought to have fizzled, it may nonetheless have helped North Korea master a design for the sort of smaller warhead that a missile could carry.
But there is a further, bigger, worry even than Mr Kim’s theatricals. North Korea and Iran have long been collaborating on building missiles; the two are thought to have worked together in Iran to improve on basic North Korean missile designs at times when it has been impolitic for the North to test for itself. Iran has learned a great deal from this work; recently it has been making strides in its own missile technology. No one knows whether this collaboration has included warhead or other nuclear work too (though North Korea appears to have helped Syria to build a suspected and almost completed plutonium-producing reactor, which Israel destroyed in an air raid in 2007).
Strutting its stuff
North Korea is evidently quite happy to brandish its bombs. It flounced out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty back in 2003 after evidence emerged that it had been cheating on an earlier denuclearisation deal with America. Iran, by contrast, claims to be an NPT member in good standing. It insists that it has no use for nuclear weapons, and that all its nuclear activities, including a uranium-enrichment effort that continues to expand in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions and sanctions, are entirely peaceful in intent; the uranium, it says, is simply intended to fuel a future fleet of power stations.
Nothing if not brazen, it claims backhanded vindication in a controversial National Intelligence Estimate by America’s spooks, which concluded a little over a year ago that Iran had indeed had a bomb programme, but that it had stopped in 2003 when its formerly secret uranium activities came to light. But what that report failed to explain clearly was that Iran was continuing work quite openly on the two other necessary components of a weapons programme: first, uranium enrichment (with a bit of time and redirection of piping, low-enriched uranium can easily be turned into the highly enriched sort needed for a bomb) and efforts to produce plutonium; and second, the efforts under way for the development of a missile that could carry a nuclear warhead.
AP Bushehr: no need for Iran’s enriched uranium here
Iran is the only country so far to have built a uranium-enrichment plant before having even a single working reactor that would need its uranium as fuel for the reactor core. Even a Russian-built reactor at Bushehr that is now being put through its technical paces before coming on-stream later this year will operate on Russian-supplied fuel. Nor does it have sufficient uranium ore of its own to sustain a large-scale enrichment effort. Since uranium exports to Iran are prohibited by UN sanctions, its only option eventually will be to import more of the stuff illegally, using the nuclear black market that enabled it to get secretly started in the uranium business.
Nonetheless, Iran has just passed another nuclear milestone. According to figures contained in a new report circulated to the 35-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear guardian, ahead of a meeting that opens on March 2nd, Iran has accumulated an unexpectedly large amount of low-enriched uranium—enough, says the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, for Iran to be confident that, should it proceed with further enrichment, it will have sufficient material for a single nuclear weapon.
What is more, the agency reported a big discrepancy (about 30%) between the amount of uranium Iran had earlier said it was producing and the amount now stockpiled. It is often hard to guess the real output of enrichment centrifuge machines, like Iran’s, in their first stages of operation. However, in the view of other experts, even rough calculations based on earlier figures should have told inspectors that the Iranian estimate was far too low. The IAEA is confident that all the enriched uranium is properly safeguarded. But safeguards are something Iran disregards when it suits.
There have long been suspicions that Iran may be engaged in a parallel, possibly military, enrichment effort: in April 2006 without notice to inspectors, it removed and then put back a cylinder of the gas from which enriched uranium of either sort is spun, so that inspectors briefly lost track of the material it contained. When they were subsequently measured, the cylinder’s contents were deemed to be correct within an acceptable margin of error. But that does not rule out the possibility that a small quantity of the gas, calculated to fall within that error margin, was diverted to test some hidden centrifuges.
As the IAEA’s latest report makes clear, Iran is also refusing them access, as required under its safeguards obligations, to the site where it is building its own plutonium-producing reactor, one that just happens to be ideally sized for making bomb material. And it will not answer increasingly pointed questions from inspectors about studies and other information provided by several governments that appear to show weapons-related work on uranium conversion, on high explosive testing for nuclear-trigger devices and—the evidence behind the doubts about Iran’s “space” programme—on development work to redesign the inner cone of a re-entry vehicle for Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, so as to accommodate a nuclear warhead.
North Korea’s neighbours may be prepared simply to huddle together, trusting in the best efforts of diplomacy and missile defences. But countries in the vicinity of Iran are becoming more agitated. Israel’s probable new prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has said a nuclear Iran poses a far graver threat than the global recession.
So Barack Obama and his new team—he has now appointed special envoys to deal with both Iran and North Korea—don’t have much time to show that their promised readiness to talk directly to Iran can produce results. And unless results are forthcoming, the long-running drama over Iran’s nuclear ambitions could rapidly escalate into a global crisis.
