Yesterday Syria, Today Burma, Tomorrow Al Qaeda

The “experts” told us that North Korea would have no reason to threaten us if we’d only “engage,” talk, and appease them. We did, and they sold Syria a nuclear reactor anyway. Others say we should just ignore them. We did, and they’re selling Burma a uranium enrichment program:

The two defectors whose briefings have created such alarm are both regarded as credible sources. One was an officer with a secret nuclear battalion in the Burmese army who was sent to Moscow for two years’ training. He was part of a nuclear programme which planned to train 1,000 Burmese. “You don’t need 1,000 people in the fuel cycle or to run a nuclear reactor. It’s obvious there is much more going on,” he said.

The other is a former executive of the regime’s leading business partner, Htoo Trading, who handled nuclear contracts with Russia and North Korea. [….]

Professor Ball and Mr Thornton reported that the army defector claimed that there were more than five North Koreans working at the Thabeik Kyin uranium processing plant in Burma and that the country was providing yellowcake ““ partially refined uranium ““ to both Iran and North Korea. [The Independent]

Despite the years of denials by some that North Korea’s uranium enrichment program was a potential danger to us, North Korea is now in a position to reproliferate that technology and to outsource parts of it that skeptics cited as evidence that North Korea had no large-scale enrichment program. How many centrifuges could Burma’s tunnels hold?

The authors concluded that the illicit nuclear co-operation was based on a trade of locally refined uranium from Burma to North Korea in return for technological expertise.

What is missing in the nuclear chain at the moment is a plutonium reprocessing plant, but according to the army defector, one was being planned at Naung Laing in northern Burma, parallel to a civilian reactor which is already under construction with Russian help.

But of course, the North Koreans have one of those. The North Korean and Burmese nuclear programs could well have been designed to work in synergy with one another.

The secret complex would be hidden in caves tunnelled into a nearby mountain. Once Burma had its own plutonium reprocessing plant, it could produce 8kg of weapons-grade plutonium-239 a year, enough to build one nuclear bomb every 12 months.

If the testimony of the two defectors proves to be correct, the secret reactor could be operational by 2014, The Herald reported.

And thus two groups of American analysts, collectively comprising an overwhelming majority of so-called expert opinion, are both proven demonstrably wrong in their prescriptions for dealing with North Korea’s real threat to us — nuclear proliferation. All we can wonder at this point is who else they’d sell to if some wahhabi oil sheikh can wire his zakaat money to Pakistan.

North Korea will proliferate nuclear technology and weapons as long as there is a North Korea. North Korea considers itself to be at war with us. Because it can’t attack us directly or conventionally, this is the means it chooses. What responsible recourse but to do what we can to hasten the regime’s extinction?