Libya Uranium Story Update
No one ever said we were, of course, but today, dedicated axis-of-evil skeptic Glenn Kessler, has written a second WaPo piece on the story in as may days, this time raising doubts, via the IAEA (remember them?), about the U.S. conclusion that North Korea was Libya’s supplier:
IAEA tests on the same container — using samples taken at the same time the United States took samples last spring — did not indicate the presence of plutonium, and the United States has not shared the results of its plutonium tests with the international agency. Moreover, the suspect container originated from Pakistan, officials said yesterday. The presence of plutonium indicates that it was in North Korea but there is no way to know the origin of the contents of the cylinder, investigators said.
On that last point, skip down to the next quote (from the same article) and come back. I’ll be right here.
So here is an internal inconsistency that North Korea could easily resolve regain the benefit of our doubts. Note that this is mostly IAEA harrumphing that it hasn’t seen our data, which is probably a smart move on our part, given where its Chairman originates, some of the things that have been going on there lately, and who else they might well be working with. Of course, there’s a big difference between saying you haven’t seen the evidence of Fact X and saying that you have seen the Fact X evidence, but that it doesn’t lead to Conclusion Y. More from the WaPo story:
“In order to come to this conclusion, you need a sample from North Korea and no one has a uranium sample from North Korea,” said one official investigating the network and Libya’s former programs. “The Pakistanis won’t allow any samples of their UF6, either,” said the official, who discussed the investigation on the condition of anonymity.
Excellent question. You’re the IAEA. Why don’t you go get that sample right now? Oh, I almost forgot.
Not that the distinction much matters, because it’s apparent that the North Korean and Pakistani nuke programs were born and matured as conjoined twins. At least some of Pakistan’s own UO6 originally came from North Korea, North Korea and Pakistan cooperated in the design and construction the centrifuges used for enrichment, Pakistan got missile technology in return, North Korea may well have been the source of Pakistan’s unenriched uranium, A.Q. Khan himself visited North Korea to provide technical assistance, and many experts have long suspected that Pakistan and North Korea jointly tested a Bomb made from North Korean plutonium in the Pakistani desert. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Ad nauseum.
The picture that emerges is of a unified weapons development network with more-or-less shared facilities for research, development, testing, and production in North Korea, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Next, Kessler tosses out this whopper:
North Korea has natural uranium, but there is no direct evidence that it can convert the material to UF6, a gas state that prepares the uranium for enrichment.
Deceptive at best, but clearly intended to mislead. Of course we don’t have any direct evidence of what North Korea is doing in its underground facilities, but we do have a pretty good idea that they can and have enriched UF6. I mean, just follow the links. But direct evidence? Absolute certainty? Isn’t that asking a lot when we’re talking about the most carefully guarded secrets of the world’s most secretive place, especially considering the consequences of being wrong? As proliferation expert Phillip Saunders explains,
Experts agree that verifying the elimination of uranium enrichment activities is more difficult than verifying the elimination of plutonium production. Plutonium production requires a large infrastructure that includes nuclear reactors and reprocessing facilities; uranium enrichment can be performed in smaller facilities that are much harder to locate and to monitor.
Returning to the WaPo article, Kessler continues:
The IAEA and U.S. intelligence launched investigations into the network and were told by Pakistan that North Korea was the source of the uranium shipment. But Khan’s Malaysian-based partner, B.S. Tahir, told U.S. intelligence Pakistan was the source. Even if North Korea made the uranium gas, some investigators believe it is unlikely that Pyongyang intended to sell it to Libya. They believe North Korea would have sold the material to Pakistan, which then sold it to Libya. Another theory is that North Korea sold raw uranium to Pakistan, which converted it to UF6 and sold it to Libya.
Those theories are plausible enough, but not comforting in the least. A destructive, noxious product sold through Amazon does not become less noxious or destructive because the Amazon gives in and stops selling it. There’s always E-Bay. Note that the New York Times reported just a year ago that North Korean nuclear scientists have been spotted living in Iran, which is probably sheltering senior Al Qaeda operatives (possibly including Sa’ad bin Laden, and under the pretense of “house arrest”). Hezbollah, which had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group until 9/11, is Iran’s wholly-owned subsidiary. Whatever the stream of commerce, the amounts are substantial and sustained enough that North Korea, at the very least, had a completely reckless disregard for the end user of this stuff. Does their specific intent really matter at that point? What matters is what past behavior tells us about the risks. According to this report, the uranium traffic been going on for a long time:
Pakistani investigators told the IAEA that 1.7 tons of UF6 were shipped to Libya in 2001, a year before Kelly presented North Korean officials with proof that North Korea was conducting a uranium program in violation of the 1994 Geneva agreement.
. . . and according to this one, the commerce appears to have been growing so fast that some of the stuff appears to have started falling off the trucks. This, from Kessler’s piece:
Libya put out an order in 2003 for 20 tons of UF6 in the hopes of beginning research and development on uranium enrichment. But it received only 1.6 tons from the Khan network, delivered in the metal cylinder [again, the cylinder was allegedly made in Pakistan], when its program was exposed in 2003.
The WaTimes, meanwhile, adds a few interesting details (print edition only, unf), beginning with some support for the idea that the North Korean uranium came through an intermediary, presumably Pakistan, and that Libya either hasn’t fingered North Korea, or perhaps we’re just not saying:
A State Deparment official said the Libyan government . . . likely purchased the North Korean material through intermediaries and as a result may not have known of the North Korean involvement.
U.S. officials . . . have said nuclear goods continued to be sent to the North African state as late as last spring, indicating the government of Col. Moammar Gadhafi may not have completely abandoned its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
The strength of the evidence matters very much, because sensibly enough, “[t]he United States regards as crossing a red line any transfer of nuclear materials from the North to a third country or terrorist groups.” In other words, we’re prepared to do something fairly drastic if North Korea is in fact selling loose nukes, and that gives some a very powerful interest raising sufficient doubt to keep us paralyzed a while longer, in the hope that perhaps we’ll eventually decide to just live with a status quo ad infinitum.
Which leads us to the predictable reaction of the BUSHLIED! constituency: raising the standards of proof to unsustainable levels, relieving the secretive rogue state of any burdens of transparency or proof, and arguing by extension that the absence of evidence in one case is the evidence of absence in all cases. Most importantly, they realize that they must present us with the false choice of appeasement or nuclear war, and that they must at all costs distract us from other, better choices that are equally disruptive of their plans. The real intent, of course, is to assign the risks such that you, I, and our kids will always bear them, as opposed to the tyrannical leader of the secretive rogue state. And since we’re not dealing with certainties here, let’s be honest about the fact that what we’re really talking about is the assignment of unthinkable risks.
I do, in fact fault President Bush for some of his pre-Iraq arguments, with the benefit of hindsight: we should not pretend that intelligence is an exact science, that its practitioners are always competent, that sources always tell the truth, that we know what all the unknowns are, or that we can ever be sure of what people are hiding from us. Sometimes it’s not as bad as we thought, sometimes it turns out to be a lot worse. Sometimes we get lucky and people are dumb enough to admit things, but for the BUSHLIED! crowd, that won’t suffice either. Nothing will, because they’re just as immune to damning facts as they are to logic. You can’t reason a person out of something he was never reasoned into.
Here’s my question for these commenters, plus Michael Moore, Chung Young-Dong, Glenn Kessler, and Mohammad El-Baradei: Would it be unreasonable to ask North Korea to provide a sample of their uranium, which all of us know damn well does exist? If they refuse to provide one, why should we continue giving them the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt–or of doubts they themselves have created about issues where we can’t afford to have them?