Category Archives: North Korea

Happy Talk

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Back in October 2002, Condi Rice was certain she knew how to keep North Korea in line.

North Korea’s collapsed economy gives the United States and its allies the diplomatic leverage to convince the communist regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions, Rice said.

“North Korea has been signaling and saying that it wants to break out of its economic isolation,” Rice told CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.” “It has to break out of its economic isolation.

“This is a regime that in terms of its economic condition is going down for the third time. Its people are starving.”

But Rice said, “It’s not going to break out of that isolation while it’s brandishing a nuclear weapon.”

U.S. officials have launched a “full-court press of consultations” with other countries in the region to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to give up the nuclear weapons effort, Rice said.

The North Korean disclosure comes as the Bush administration faces a possible military confrontation with Iraq over its efforts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he considered North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and missile capability a bigger threat to the United States than Iraq.

Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the White House to rethink its priorities.

But Rice said Iraq’s history shows the Baghdad regime is harder to contain than North Korea.

“These are not comparable situations,” she said. “They’re dangerous, both of them dangerous. But we believe that we have different methods that will work in North Korea that clearly have not and will not work in Iraq.”

Now it’s October 2006. North Korea claims it is about to test a nuclear bomb. This morning South Korean soldiers fired warning shots at North Korean troops that had crossed the border, and Pyongyang threatens “catastrophe.”

Where is Secretary of State Rice today, btw? She’s off the radar at the moment. She may be in hiding after her recent trip to Iraq. From an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times:

AFTER CIRCLING THE BAGHDAD airport for 40 minutes because of mortar and rocket fire, traveling by helicopter to the Green Zone to avoid the deadly bomb-strewn highway into the city and holding a meeting with President Jalal Talabani in darkness because the power was suddenly cut off, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a news conference Thursday to talk about all the progress being made in Iraq.

Latest news from Iraq, courtesy of the Washington Post:

The number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.

Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq, the highest number since the military assault to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Nicholas Kristof suggests we should listen to the Iraqis.

Iraqis are crystal clear about what the U.S. should do: announce a timetable for withdrawal of our troops within one year. They’re right. Our failure to declare a timetable and, above all, our coveting long-term military bases in Iraq feed the insurgency and end up killing more young Americans.

A terrifying new poll conducted last month found that 61 percent of Iraqis now approve of attacks on Americans. That figure, up from 47 percent in January, makes counter-insurgency efforts almost impossible, because ordinary people now cheer, shelter and protect those who lay down bombs to kill Americans. The big change is that while Iraqi Sunnis were always in favor of blowing up Americans, members of the Shiite majority are now 50 percent more likely to support violent attacks against Americans than they were in January.

The poll, by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, also found that 78 percent of Iraqis now believe that the American military presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing.”


Fareed Zakaria says it IS civil war:

Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more- sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.

Iraq is now in a civil war. Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three years, more than in many other conflicts widely recognized as civil wars. The number of internal refugees, mostly Sunni victims of ethnic cleansing, has exploded over the past few months, and now exceeds a quarter of a million people. (The Iraqi government says 240,000, but this doesn’t include Iraqis who have fled abroad or who may not have registered their move with the government.) The number of attacks on Shiite mosques increases every week: there have been 69 such attacks since February, compared with 80 in the previous two and a half years. And the war is being fought on gruesome new fronts. CBS News’s Lara Logan has filed astonishing reports on the Health Ministry, which is run by supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. According to Logan, hospitals in Baghdad and Karbala are systematically killing Sunni patients and then dumping their bodies in mass graves.

If I were Condi Rice I’d be off the radar, too. I don’t believe she’s scheduled for the talk shows today; we’ll see.

I want to go back to Korea for a moment. Rightie mythos says that it’s Bill Clinton’s fault that North Korea has nukes. I explained here why this is nonsense; it was Bush who screwed up, not Clinton. See also “Rolling Blunder” by Fred Kaplan and the Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes page from The Mahablog archives. I’m not going to re-explain all that this morning, except to say that the series of Bushie blunders that led to North Korea resuming plutonium processing was partly a reaction to diplomatic talks between Japan and North Korea. And why was that a problem? Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had gone to North Korea to work out a long-range missile agreement without consulting the United States first.

Well, today it appears that Japan and China have stepped into the foreign policy vacuum created by the implosion of U.S. global influence. (And is it significant that Shinzo Abe, Japan’s brand-new Prime Minister, made China his first official overseas destination? China and Japan haven’t had bilateral talks for years.) This seems to me a pretty clear indicator of how much our standing in the world has fallen.

And if you want to hear more about the progress we’re making in Iraq, read Peter Beaumont in today’s Observer: “Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq’s women.”

All together now — we’re doin’ a heck of a job.

See also: Michael Hirsh, “Ike Was Right.”

Bolton Lies; Righties Confused

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I saw this headline on Memeorandum — “John Bolton Embarrasses a Confused Senator Kerry (Video)” — linking to a rightie site, and of course I had to click on it. And here is the exchange in which Bolton allegedly “totally outclassed” Senator Kerry, according to the rightie.

Democrats like John Kerry have vowed to fight the nomination (of John Bolton). Kerry showed up at the very last minute of today’s hearing and it turned into a barbed exchange between the Bush Administration’s attempt to engage North Korea in 6 party talks:

    John Kerry: This has been going on for five years, Mr. Ambassador.

    John Bolton: It’s the nature of multilateral negotiations, Senator.

    John Kerry: Why not engage in a bilateral one and get the job done? That’s what the Clinton Administration did.

    John Bolton: And, very poorly since the North Koreans violated the agreed framework almost from the time it was signed.

Ouch!… It’s pretty painful to watch.

What’s painful is that Bolton was wrong, as in either ignorant or lying, and righties are too dense to realize it.

Returning to the “Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes” Mahablog archive, we find (note in particular difference between uranium and plutonium) —

Throughout 1993 North Korea and the IAEA inspectors engaged in major head butting. The IAEA said North Korea had more uranium and plutonium fuel than it was admitting to. Also, the U.S. announced that it had intelligence, some from satellite photos, that there was a lot of nuclear-waste-related activity going on in North Korea that had been concealed from the IAEA. Details here.

Although North Korea had both uranium and plutonium, it was the plutonium that really worried everyone. In the nuclear weapons biz there is a huge difference between plutonium and uranium that news stories don’t always make clear. Very basically, you need vast amounts of uranium and years and years of processing in order to get enough nuclear stuff to make a bomb. But plutonium is nearly ready to use out of the box, so to speak.

The biggest point of ignorance on the part of the righties has to do with the distinction between plutonium and uranium, and as I said, lots of journalists, and also lots of politicians, are not clear about this, either. But now you are informed.

So, even though North Korea had both uranium and plutonium, it was the plutonium that concerned the rest of the world. The North Koreans were thought to be years away from doing much with the uranium. But by 1993 it was believed North Korea already had enough plutonium in the can, so to speak, for at least one nuclear weapon.

With me so far? Plutonium real bad, real scary. Uranium bad and scary, but harder to make a bomb with than plutonium. More details about this below.

In 1994, western intelligence sources realized that a reprocessing complex being built at Yongbyon included a gas graphite reactor designed specifically for separating plutonium from nuclear waste. This scared the stuffing out of lots of people. The IAEA believed North Korea was hiding more plutonium somewhere. And then North Korea announced it was restricting IAEA inspections. Matters came to a head in June 1994, when North Korea relinquished its IAEA membership and all the inspectors cleared out of the country.

But then along came Jimmy. In June 1994, former President Carter went to North Korea to negotiate with Kim Il Sung, president of North Korea. These negotiations were a great success. North Korea committed to freezing its plutonium weapons program in exchange for two proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors and other aid. …

… Specifically, the agreement stipulated that North Korea’s graphite-moderated nuclear power plants, which could easily produce weapons grade plutonium, would be replaced with light water reactor (LWR) power plants by a target date of 2003.

You can read the actual text of the 1994 agreement here. You will see that the language of the agreement refers specifically to North Korea’s “graphite-moderated reactors and related facilities.” The graphite reactors, as explained above, were specifically for separating plutonium from nuclear waste. I am no nuclear engineer, but from my research I believe graphite reactors are not used for processing uranium. It’s easier to process uranium in other ways. For more information, here is an article about North Korea’s graphite reactors from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

I have found another good source for historical background, which is this PBS Online Newshour page on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. It provides a basic history of North Korea’s nuclear research programs going back to the Korean War. If you scroll down to the part about the Agreed Framework, you read (emphasis added),

The main goal in offering North Korea LWRs [light water reactors]was to eliminate the output of plutonium that could be used for weapons. David Albright and Holly Higgins of the Institute for Science and International Security explained the difference between the reactors in a 1997 report.

“If the two light water reactors slated to be built in North Korea are operated to optimize power production, they will discharge about 500 kg of reactor-grade plutonium a year in highly radioactive spent fuel. However, this plutonium cannot be used in nuclear weapons until it is separated from this radioactive fuel,” Albright and Higgins wrote. “North Korea’s existing reprocessing plant…would require extensive and difficult modification to separate all this plutonium.”

Back to the “Blame Bush” page in The Mahablog archives:

And, in spite of what the righties will tell you, the North Koreans kept this agreement. The plutonium processing at Yongbyon and elsewhere stopped, and IAEA inspectors were allowed back into North Korea. The plutonium processors were sealed with IAEA seals.

As for the U.S. part of the bargain — the U.S. was supposed to supply North Korea with fuel oil until the first of the light-water reactors went online. The target date for that was 2003. Congress dragged its feet on approving the funds for the fuel oil, so the Clinton Administration got around this by forming a multinational consortium, called KEDO to implement the agreement and build the reactors. KEDO began fuel shipments in 1995. Construction on the reactors was held up, mostly by North Korea, and didn’t begin until 2001. Construction was suspended in 2003. This is also explained on the PBS Online Newshour page linked above. (Note: Wikipedia gets some details about the LWRs wrong, so don’t use it as a source.)

Now, strictly speaking, North Korea wasn’t supposed to process uranium either, especially not weapons grade uranium, because it was signed on to other agreements — the Korean Peninsula Denuclearization Declaration, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, etc. And, according to the PBS page, North Korea was alleged to be either processing uranium or preparing to process uranium in the 1990s. The Clinton Administration knew of this by 1998 or so. The Clinton Administration felt the situation needed watching. But U.S. intelligence said North Korea was a long way away from having weapons grade uranium, so it was not a situation that needed to be blown up into an international crisis right away.

As explained on the “Blame Bush” page in detail, nearly as soon as he became president George W. Bush began to antagonize both North and South Korea in several ways. Then in the fall of 2002 James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, made a big stink about North Korea’s processing of uranium. That’s uranium, notice, not plutonium. So in the weeks before the November 2002 elections, and just about the time concrete was being poured for the first light-water reactor, Bush Administration surrogates were all over the cable news talk shows hoo-hawing about how the Clinton Administration was so stupid that they didn’t know North Korea was violating the agreement. Except at that time North Korea was not processing plutonium.

How reliable are the Bush Administration’s claims about uranium? In the January/February 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, Selig Harrison argued that the Bush Administration was way short of credible evidence that North Korea was seeking to process weapons-grade uranium. Could the Bush Administration have misrepresented and distorted the intelligence data the way it did with Iraq?

A review of the available evidence suggests that this is just what happened. Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons.

This part is critical:

Washington’s accusation of Pyongyang was delivered during a visit to the North Korean capital by James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Kelly told a key North Korean official that he had evidence of a uranium-enrichment project. According to Kelly, the North Korean official, First Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, acknowledged the existence of such a program at the time. But Kang has subsequently denied this; what he actually told Kelly, according to Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun, was deliberately ambiguous: that North Korea is “entitled” to have such a program or “an even more powerful one” to deter a pre-emptive U.S. attack. …

… Kelly’s confrontation with Kang seems to have been inspired by the growing alarm felt in Washington in the preceding five months over the ever more conciliatory approach that Seoul and Tokyo had been taking toward Pyongyang; by raising the uranium issue, the Bush administration hoped to scare Japan and South Korea into reversing their policies.

Kelly’s grandstanding activities came immediately after Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had gone to North Korea without consulting the United States to work out a long-range missile agreement. The Bush Administration, in effect, threw a temper tantrum.

Faced with the prospect that the North Korea policies of South Korea and Japan had slipped out of its control, the Bush administration “saw a real possibility that its options on the [Korean] peninsula would increasingly be driven by the policy agendas of others,” wrote Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in the summer of 2003. Plans for Kelly’s visit to Pyongyang were accelerated, and his showdown with North Korean leaders came less than three weeks after Koizumi’s meeting with Kim Jong Il.

Pollack suggests that Kelly’s charges were not justified by U.S. intelligence.

You can read the details in the Foreign Affairs article. Selig Harrison goes on to argue that North Korea didn’t have the equipment or capacity to process weapons-grade uranium. Harrison goes into a lot of detail about what North Korea had and what it had bought from whom; again, you can read about that in the article. Bottom line, North Korea was nowhere near having the 1,300 high-performance centrifuges required to process weapons-grade uranium, much less all the replacement parts they would need to keep the operation running.

I’m not going to re-hash the whole sorry history of the Bush Administration’s “negotiations” with North Korea. There’s been a lot of bad behavior on both sides. The juicy bits are these: In December 2002 the Bush Administration announced it was stopping the oil shipments, and North Korea responded by saying it would go back into the plutonium processing biz. And in February 2005 North Korea announced it had plutonium weapons.

And John Bolton is full of shit, and the righties are still ignorant of what’s really going on. Yada, yada, yada.

I hope you don’t mind my re-hashing this North Korean stuff. I just feel compelled to try to get the truth out every time the Bushies repeat the lies.