WaPo Columnist Reveals NK-Syria Nuclear Agreement

In yesterday’s Washington Post, David Ignatius wrote a column pining for  a “breakthrough” in Chris Hill’s failed Agreed Framework 2.0.  Ignatius defines that as getting our hands on 30-40 kilograms of North Korean plutonium, which happens to  coincide with  North Korea’s own  low-range estimate.  Hill has been eager to accept this lower figure in the interests of declaring victory, although some U.S. estimates have put the actual figure closer to 50 kilograms.  The discrepancy is enough for a couple of nuclear weapons … not that we’ll ever get gram one. 

Further down, as  Ignatius reveals the news  I’ve waited for since last September,  he exemplifies why any unverifiable deal  with North Korea (this one, for example) is illusory:

The mystery centers on Israel’s Sept. 6 bombing of a facility in Syria. This was to be the site of a nuclear reactor, U.S. officials believe. North Korea had made a secret agreement to provide technical know-how and some materials for the reactor, although not fissile material. The Israelis destroyed the reactor site — but neither they nor the United States made any public statement about the attack.  [….]

U.S. officials have begun to confirm publicly that they have hard intelligence about North Korean proliferation. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said in Feb. 7 testimony to the House intelligence committee: “While Pyongyang denies a program for uranium enrichment and also denies its proliferation activities, we know North Korea continues to engage in both.” In a telephone interview last week, a senior intelligence official confirmed the Syria nuclear connection, saying: “Our suspicions are justified and valid. A lot of due diligence was done on this. People are confident.”  [David Ignatius, Washington Post]  

In the end, Ignatius is sensible enough to concede that “it doesn’t make sense to continue with a charade.”  Our problem is compounded by  what we’ve learned  about  the limitations of intelligence, which has famously overestimated what I’ll call certain  WMD threats, and less famously underestimated others.  We’re all  entitled to be a skeptical consumers of intelligence, and we’d be  suicidal if we weren’t skeptical about North Korean assurances (not long ago, they were insisting that their nuclear program was exclusively for generating electricity).  Without the kind of transparency and verification that North Korea hasn’t agreed to provide and never will, we’ll never have the kind of security that comes from certainty.

This could be a moment of some real significance because of the very fact we’ve learned it.  Someone in the Administration has decided that this isn’t an issue that can be overlooked, and because of this leak, that’s probably impossible now.  At best — I use that word intentionally — it could mean that the Administration realizes that this deal is going nowhere, and that there’s no more time for stalling.  If so, that would mean that Geneva was North Korea’s last chance.

Is it time for Plan B yet?

(Big hat tip to Richardson for this one.)