North Korea’s Uranium Enrichment: Raising the Stakes

Umm, about that North Korean uranium enrichment program the Bush Administration made up ….

North Korea said Friday that it is in the final stages of enriching uranium, a process that could give the nation a second way to make nuclear bombs in addition to its known plutonium-based program.

North Korea informed the U.N. Security Council it is forging ahead with its nuclear programs in spite of international calls to abandon its atomic ambitions, the official Korean Central News Agency said in a report early Friday.

The dispatch said plutonium “is being weaponized,” and that uranium enrichment — a program North Korea revealed in recent months — was entering the “completion phase.” [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]

Selig Harrison and David Albright were not available for comment.

You could say, in response to this, that just because the North Koreans say they’ve done something doesn’t make it true, but that would also be just as true of what the North Koreans say they’re not doing. You could say that we don’t know much about the program’s scale, which is true because none of our disarmament diplomacy has demanded that North Korea tell us about the program or allow us to verify its disclosures. The State Department’s strategy for dealing with this potential threat has been to spend the better part of the last 15 years trying to it didn’t exist. As a result, North Korea may now have an easily concealed path to a nuclear weapon. We don’t know how big a threat it is, what tunnel (or even in what country) the centrifuges are, how the product is moved, or who might buy it.

North Korea’s obvious intent here is to raise the ante on President Obama and persuade him that sanctions are counterproductive. Of course, diplomatic outreach to North Korea has mostly helped it go nuclear even faster, but it’s probably also true that sanctions alone won’t do much more than slow the rate at which North Korea arms and proliferates. North Korea’s strategy is to ride the storm out, expecting that Obama will lose his will, or that South Korea or China will eventually break break ranks and infuse it with some regime-sustaining cash. The answer to this should be to raise the ante ourselves in some way that threatens what is dear to the Dear Leader. The challenge is to do this without initiating the sort of military brinkmanship that Kim’s regime feeds on, and which tends to panic American and South Korean reporters more than it does North Korean generals.

An obvious answer is more of the subversive outreach to the North Korean people that plays on the regime’s greatest vulnerability — its profound, but mostly unfocused unpopularity. More broadcasting is a part of this, as is asylum for refugees and training those refugees to rebuild to become the future builders and leaders of a post-Kim Jong Il North Korea. But more than any of those things, it would be something as innocuous as the clandestine introduction of camera phones with the range to call anyone in South Korea from anywhere in North Korea. (Among other things, this would save much time on needlessly painstaking negotiations on family reunions.) This one simple act could completely destroy the regime’s capacity to control the economy, to isolate dissent, to keep secrets, and even its monopoly on information in just one year. That is why there is nothing Kim Jong Il fears more, including financial sanctions, but with the possible exception of a flood of cheap Tokarevs and RPG’s.

This is how we raise the ante on Kim Jong Il and force his regime — if not His Withering Majesty — to know that the path of confrontation only leads to the gallows.