Yes, Selig Harrison, North Korea Cheated

The revelations about North Korea’s highly enriched uranium program had already been falling like the snow on Seoul this week, and then I saw this:

North Korea appears to have started a uranium enrichment program soon after it agreed in a 1994 deal with the U.S. to dismantle its existing plutonium nuclear weapons program, South Korea’s foreign minister said Wednesday.

Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan’s remark, if accurate, suggests North Korea had no intention of giving up its atomic ambitions when it signed the 1994 pact that defused an earlier crisis over its plutonium-based bomb program.

Suspicions about a North Korean uranium program touched off a new nuclear standoff in 2002, when a U.S. official said the North privately admitted having such a secret program. [AP, Jae Soon Chang]

Unfortunately, the South Koreans don’t tell us much about how they know this.

Coincidentally, I was already about 90% done with a detailed article for The New Ledger about the evidence that North Korea cheated all along, contrary to the doctrinaire insistence of some, notably Mike Chinoy, that George W. Bush threw away Agreed Framework I and missed a chance to disarm North Korea through diplomacy. Some have even blamed Bush for North Korea acquiring nukes.

Related: I had never seen the response to Selig Harrison in Foreign Affairs co-written by Robert Gallucci, Clinton’s chief negotiator with North Korea, until a reader and friend directed it to me last week. It’s must-reading for anyone tempted to take Selig Harrison seriously:

The United States, for a number of years, has had well-founded suspicions that North Korea has been working on the enrichment of uranium. Indeed, in both 1999 and 2000, the Clinton administration was unable to certify to Congress that North Korea was not pursuing a uranium-enrichment capability. (This fact alone should dispel claims of partisanship on this point.) In mid-2002, the Bush administration obtained clear evidence that North Korea had acquired material and equipment for a centrifuge facility that, when complete, could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year.

Although the straw man David Albright knocked down was a case consisting mostly of evidence that North Korea purchased aluminum tubes, the evidence consists of much more than that, but I’ll let you read the rest on your own. For what it’s worth, North Korea later provided a sample of the tubing, which turned out to contain traces of highly enriched uranium.