The HEU Debate Is Officially Over

From December 2002 until March 2009, it was the shared narrative of the shrill left, mainstream Democrats, and much of the spin circus in tow behind them that Kim Jong Il’s successful development of nuclear weapons was really George W. Bush’s fault.  This narrative held as infallible dogma that Agreed Framework I was successfully containing Kim Jong Il’s nuclear programs until Bush showed up to wreck it with suspect claims about WMD programs — specifically, the accusation that North Korea cheated on Agreed Framework I by enriching uranium, seeking a second, more easily concealed route to a nuclear bomb.

The problem with this narrative is that Bush’s accusation was true:  the North Koreans had admitted it, the Pakistanis had corroborated it, and we found casks of North Korean low-enriched uranium in Libya.  North Korea eventually humiliated its apologists by inadvertently turning over documents and aluminum samples contaminated with traces of — wait for it — highly enriched uranium, or HEU.  It was also false that the Bush Administration repudiated the first Agreed Framework.  In December 2002, after the North Koreans brazenly admitted that they were assembling a secret HEU program in violation of the agreement, the Bush Administration concluded that Congress wouldn’t fund any more fuel oil and stopped delivering fuel oil, but did not renounce the entire agreement.  Here, Bush’s critics tend to forget that presidents lack the constitutional authority to spend money that Congress hasn’t appropriated.  At most, Bush hastened the inevitable.  The North Koreans seized the excuse they’d probably always wanted and repudiated what remained of Agreed Framework I.  Another point that some would have us forget is that, according to this New York Times report, the North Koreans may have tested their first nuclear weapon in Pakistan in 1998.

By January 2009, with the election safely behind her and having been briefed on the intelligence, Hillary Clinton treated the HEU program as an accepted fact at her confirmation hearing.  Mainstream Democrats, to their credit, dropped their increasingly implausible skepticism about North Korea’s HEU cheating.  Most of the rank-and-file dutifully followed, forgetting everything they’d said for the last six years.  And once North Korea tested an ICBM and a nuke, they had an profound epiphany:  that the North Koreans really are lying assholes after all.

(By the way, if you care what the North Koreans themselves say, they’re back to admitting that they have an HEU program after all.)

The HEU debate cost the Republicans credibility, too.  After rightly calling the North Koreans out for cheating and rightly criticizing the many flaws of Agreed Framework I, the Bush legacy will be Agreed Framework II, which was, if anything, even more flawed than Agreed Framework I, and which willfully ignored the HEU program that had blown up Agreed Framework I to begin with.  Almost no Republicans liked Agreed Framework II, but liberal Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee was one of them.  Most Republicans kept their opposition to Agreed Framework II to themselves.  A few Democrats expressed their approval openly, but most said nothing, knowing that however things worked out, it was a win-win for them.

Who still denies that the North Koreans are trying to develop a uranium bomb?  Two groups, mainly:  inflexible North Korea apologists, and those still so obsessed with being enemies of George W. Bush and/or America itself that they’re willing to overlook Kim Jong Il’s flaws and define him as a friend, of sorts.

But in America last week, the belief that North Korea has a covert HEU program officially became the majority view in both parties.  One speech last week ended the debate about everything but the program’s scale and progress.  The speaker was Gary Samore, who holds the cumbersome title of Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation, and Terrorism.  While you’re taking a deep breath from saying that, you might also try to figure out where Samore fits in among the NSC, State, and DNI.  Whatever the answer, Samore seems to speak for the Obama Administration.  Last week, he went to give an on-the-record speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, where he said this:

On North Korea and enrichment, look, I’m absolutely convinced that they have been pursuing a secret enrichment program.  There’s no doubt about it.  What I don’t know is how extensive it is, how advanced it is.  So any … I mean, if we ever get back to the bargaining table with the North Koreans, which I think we will, that will have to be one of the issues on the table, because we can’t just deal with a solution that limits and contains their plutonium program without knowing whether we’ve also closed the other route.  And that’s going to be a very difficult issue to deal with.  The North Koreans have made it a little bit easier by announcing that they do indeed have an enrichment program designed to produce low enriched uranium for nuclear power reactors, but that’s going to be a tough issue to address, because there’s so much that’s unknown about that program.  [Gary Samore at IIIS, Q&A Following Speech]

Where are David Albright and Selig Harrison when I actually care how they’ll explain themselves for once?  Mainstream Democrats deserve nothing but commendation for accepting a realistic new view of North Korea’s intentions, but Albright and Harrison are another matter entirely.  Both hissed spurious conspiracy theories at the Bush Administration, and the shrill and the shallow scribes of the angry left snorted up every line of it.  Now that the Obama Administration is saying the very same thing, we’re not hearing a word from any of them (though maybe we should be thankful for small favors).  Having been not just wrong, but recklessly so, Albright and Harrison have earned a complete, verifiable, and irreversible decommissioning from the roster of respectable as “scholars” or “experts” on North Korea’s WMD programs.  Albright, who left himself an exit strategy by allowing that North Korea might have had just a small HEU program, is a scientist who should stick to science.  After all, any HEU program is a serious violation of either agreed framework and a matter too important to trivialize and politicize as he did.  Harrison, on the other hand, is a hack apologist for North Korea with nothing useful to add to any discussion of North Korea.  And whatever obscurity he scurries off to, let him take Leon Sigal with them.

Samore said some other interesting things, which I’ll take up tomorrow.