Gullible’s Travels: The Selective Disbelief of Selig S. Harrison

Here’s the latest installment of North Korea’s hostile policy:

The North Korean military declared an “all-out confrontational posture” against South Korea on Saturday as an American scholar said North Korean officials told him they had “weaponized” enough plutonium for roughly four or five nuclear bombs.

American intelligence officials have previously estimated that the North had harvested enough fuel for six or more bombs, although it has never been clear whether the North constructed the weapons. The scholar, Selig S. Harrison, said the officials had not defined what “weaponized” meant, but the implication was that they had built nuclear arms.

The North conducted a test of a nuclear device in 2006, but it appeared to result in a fizzle and experts concluded the explosion was relatively small. While the country has often claimed to possess a “deterrent,” this appears to be the first time it has quantified how much plutonium it says it has turned into weapons. [N.Y. Times, Choe Sang-hun]

There are several reasons this doesn’t excite me very much: (1) we’d already have to assume as much; (2) the North Koreans said it, so who really knows if it’s true? and (3) we can take some comfort from the fact that their weapons don’t work very well. The demonstration of an effective nuclear capability will require at least one more test. That will probably panic a lot of jittery diplomats and KOSPI traders, but it will also consume a few more grams of their fissile material — material that won’t be put in a bomb a sold to a terrorist.

Four or five bombs? It’s of dubious value to build a bomb that tests poorly, but in theory the actual number of bombs could be higher. This estimate is suspect, because it’s tailored to North Korea’s suspect claim that it had only reprocessed 37 kilograms of plutonium. U.S. intelligence estimates cited by Reuters are closer to 50 kilograms, and other estimates are even higher. We’ll never know, of course, because the North Koreans will never let us verify anything they tell us. Either we demand what the North Koreans will never give us, or we take their word for it.

Notice how Selig Harrison manages to be a tool for both the North Koreans and the left-leaning American press. Odd how he can do that so seamlessly:

Despite that news, he said all the officials he met with seemed eager to open discussions with the incoming Obama administration. “All the statements about Obama were very helpful, very respectful,” he said. Mr. Harrison said the North Korean officials had several proposals for Mr. Obama, including allowing North Korea to have access to long-term, low-interest credit to buy food.

You don’t say! I’ll go out on a long limb here and guess that Harrison would have us take the North Koreans at their word and pay up. No wonder he’s such a frequent guest in Pyongyang.

But Harrison doesn’t abandon his skepticism for just anyone. Some of you will remember his Foreign Affairs article, “” in which Harrison claimed that “the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data” pointing to North Korea’s undeclared uranium enrichment program. The Times unhelpfully fails to point out that Harrison’s article has since been discredited by overwhelming evidence — most of it provided by the North Koreans themselves — that they were enriching uranium. I summarized that evidence the other day, commenting on Hillary Clinton’s remarkable and commendable acknowledgment of North Korea’s cheating:

That’s a pretty big concession when you consider that denying either the fact or the significance of North Korea’s uranium cheat is essential to any defense of Agreed Framework I, and hence of President Clinton’s North Korea policy. Some A.F. 1.0 defenders had tried to minimize the HEU cheat as insignificant, while others suggested that it was all just a trumped up necon causus belli. So what was it that shut all these people up? Was it the enriched uranium we found on those aluminum samples the North Koreans gave us, or was it the enriched uranium we found smeared all over their “disclosure” documents? Was it the damning admissions of A.Q. Khan and Benazir Bhutto? Or was it North Korea’s brazen 2002 admission, which some had feebly tried to ascribe to a translation error? Maybe North Korea’s 2007 admission that it procured centrifuge components, perhaps? All I know is that David Albright has been strangely quiet recently, and that Mike Chinoy’s book — now there is some really bad timing — was forgotten the week after it was rolled out. After all of the noise, the eerie unanimity of North Korea’s cheating includes William Perry, Condi Rice, and now, Hillary Clinton.

There’s more here and here, if that’s still not enough for you.

(In case you were wondering what David Albright — recall my dustup with Albright at this blog — has to say about this, commenter “someguy” points to our answer. Albright now argues that the North Koreans were only caught with an eensy bit of highly enriched uranium, which has the same hollow ring as “only slighly pregnant.” Albright insists, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that the enriched uranium could have come from Pakistan. But in the grander scheme, so what? The question of origin is secondary to the fact of possession. I’d have more respect for Albright’s scientific objectivity if he’d place any honest doubts he has in the context of the newly discovered evidence and changed facts. Wouldn’t a more intellectually honest, less doctrinaire observer at least acknowledge that there are legitimate questions that we need to have answered? Would Albright be less alarmed, or find the question to be any less legitimate, if the uranium came from Iran?)

The discovery of highly enriched uranium in the possession of the North Koreans — to say nothing of their admissions to having an HEU program — devastates Harrison’s central argument, that the CIA’s intelligence could just as well have pointed to low enriched uranium for the generation of electricity. Note my use of the qualifier “could just as well have;” if anything, Harrison’s argument is even more qualified and speculative in its search for an exculpatory explanation. That explanation has since imploded on contact with the evidence.

Selig Harrison was not just demonstrably wrong. He crossed the line from necessary skepticism about what our government tells us to the kind of venomous atheism that presumes the falsity of what it says, regardless of the evidence (here, Harrison could easily prove me wrong by retracting his Foreign Affairs article). This kind of unsupported conspiracy mongering is caustic to any objective threat analysis, a process that badly needs to be less, not more, politicized. But facts are stubborn things, especially when they interfere with the discredited appeasement policies that Harrison spends the first pages of his article advocating. In contrast, one can only wonder what about the North Koreans is so believable to Harrison’s more credulous side.

Likewise, we can wonder why any newspaper editor would still believe that Selig S. Harrison’s expertise and judgment qualify him as an expert authority on how to disarm North Korea.