To Slip the Noose

The New York Times has a very interesting piece war-gaming the enforcement the Proliferation Security Initiative.

One possibility would be for North Korea to try to smuggle out weapons or weapons components across its land borders with China or Russia, and then to a Chinese or Russian port. The weapons could then be loaded on a vessel secretly owned by North Korea but flying another country’s flag — and perhaps not be closely watched by Western intelligence services as a result.

Or weapons could be loaded on a North Korean ship flying its own flag, and the registration of the ship could be altered after it left port. “In the middle of the night, they could change the name and change the flag,” said Gary Wolfe, a maritime lawyer at Seward & Kissel, a New York law firm.

Still another possibility, shipping and security experts said, would be for a North Korean-flagged ship to transfer cargo to a North Korean ship carrying another flag, either in port or in midocean if it were a calm day and the cargo small enough.

Changing the registration of a ship — and therefore its flag — is fairly simple. A ship owner simply sends the necessary paperwork to a country’s ship registry, along with a fee of as little as $1,000. The vessel is not required to visit the country where it is registered, or even go to port.

Ship registries do require basic information about a vessel’s length and tonnage. So if a ship of a certain size and displacement disappears from one ship’s registry and a vessel of equal size and displacement pops up with a different name on another registry at the same time, they may be the same ship and could be identified with careful sleuthing, Mr. Wolfe said.

The Pong Su sailed from North Korea to Singapore in 2003 under a North Korean flag. The vessel then switched its registration to Tuvalu and sailed on to Australia, where witnesses saw a dinghy coming ashore with what proved to be the shipment of heroin.

This one is really worth reading. Meanwhile, South Korea’s crazy old uncle is back off his meds, warning that North Korea might react to such actions with force — well, duh — and blaming the United States for the failure of the Sunshine Policy:

But the North’s nuclear and missile programs have prevented warmer ties between the longtime foes, who remain technically at war because they have never signed a peace treaty. Kim blamed that failure on a breakdown in relations between Pyongyang and Washington — not from shortcomings in his “sunshine policy.”

“The reason why the ‘sunshine policy’ could not be fully be completed and was not a full success was because of stalled U.S.-North Korean relations,” Kim said.