What? North Korea had a secret uranium enrichment program all along? Why was Mike Chinoy not informed?

Siegfried Hecker seems significantly more astonished than I am that North Korea has 2,000 centrifuges spinning out enriched uranium.

[W]hatever the reason for the revelation, which a seasoned American nuclear scientist called “stunning,” it provides a new set of worries for the Obama administration, which is sending its special envoy on North Korea for talks with officials in South Korea, Japan and China this week.

The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted Saturday that he was taken during a recent trip to the North’s main Yongbyon atomic complex to a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility. It had 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, he said, and the North told him it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor.

But until recently, it seemed that North Korea Expert Mike Chinoy spoke for the majority among this city’s media and foreign policy elite:

The book showed that US intelligence did discover in 2002-2003 a North Korea effort to acquire components that could be used for uranium enrichment but that it was only a procurement effort. There was no credible intelligence that North Koreans actually had a facility capable of making uranium based bombs. Yet, conservative hardliners bent on ending an “Agreed Framework” nuclear deal with North Korea forged under president Bill Clinton’s administration seized on the issue to force a confrontation, the book said.

As of the time of this writing, you could get a new hard cover copy of “Meltdown” on Amazon for $7.22, or a used one for $3.58, about the price of a venti half-caff soy latte.

Let’s not forget the words of Professional North Korea Expert Selig Harrison, who I understand has been to Pyongyang a few times:

Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons.

And here is JCS Chairman and noted neocon ideologue, Admiral Mike Mullen:

“From my perspective, it’s North Korea continuing on a path which is destabilizing for the region. It confirms or validates the concern we’ve had for years about their enriching uranium,” Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Pretty much. I won’t suspend respiration while I await the apologies honorable men would feel compelled to offer at a time like this. Of course, no one should ever owe an apology for rationally and objectively questioning the evidence for James Kelley’s fateful assertion, had they done nothing more than this. Instead, Harrison wrote a venomous and conspiratorial tract that was so toxic to rational policy deliberations that it drew a joint rebuke from Robert Gallucci and Mitchell Reiss (though it seems to have fired the enthusiasm of a certain class of journalists to seek Harrison out and quote him as an expert authority). Chinoy’s argument, coming much later, ran contrary to even more of the evidence that had since piled up. In retrospect, Chinoy must have felt cursed that his book went to print just as traces of highly enriched uranium turned up on North Korean aluminum samples, and later, on documents from Yongbyon.

Harrison and Chinoy may well get away without being asked how they could have been so wrong about this; after all, they aren’t policy-makers. But it would be perplexing to see other journalists quoting them as “experts” now. Perhaps they will try to salvage some of their credibility by arguing that North Korea’s now-unquestionable, large-scale uranium enrichment is something new, inspired only by the hard-line policies of Barack Obama and his neocon cabal (but not by George W. Bush’s Agreed Framework II, presumably). The problem with this argument is that the people with access to the classified intelligence tell us North Korea’s uranium enrichment program isn’t new:

Stephen Bosworth’s comments, following a meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan, came as the United States and the North’s neighbors scrambled to deal with Pyongyang’s revelation to a visiting American nuclear scientist of a highly sophisticated, modern enrichment operation that had what the North says are 2,000 recently completed centrifuges.

“This is obviously a disappointing announcement. It is also another in a series of provocative moves” by North Korea, Bosworth said. “That being said, this is not a crisis. We are not surprised by this. We have been watching and analyzing the (North’s) aspirations to produce enriched uranium for some time.”

Kim also played down the facility, telling reporters: “It’s nothing new.”

They’re right. We could see from open sources that this hasn’t been news since the end of the Clinton Administration. I’m guessing that by the time Gary Samore weighed in here, those with access to the classified information may have known a few more things that are still unknown to open-source publications, but well enough known to the North Koreans that they concluded they had nothing to lose by giving Mr. Hecker this tour. What’s more, creating a false sense of crisis benefits no one but Kim Jong Il. Yet already, some who waited patiently for decades of diplomacy to produce no results at all are trying to do just that — create a sense of crisis, declaring this false crisis to be proof that sanctions have decisively failed after three whole months.

But of course, the open-source evidence of North Korea’s interest in acquiring a large-scale uranium-enrichment capability is extensive and dates back to the days of Agreed Framework I, notwithstanding the denials of pundits who desperately tried to discount that evidence because (a) they hated George W. Bush more than Kim Jong Il, or (b) because they wanted to deny that two agreed frameworks were demonstrable failures at disarming North Korea. We may have had doubts about the number and locations of centrifuges — all I know is what’s in open sources. But the real significance of North Korea’s revelation is that policymakers are liberated from having to rehash those tired old arguments, just as we should all be liberated from having to keep listening to those who made them in defiance of so much evidence. It’s time we came to accept that there’s nothing our diplomats can offer North Korea’s dictatorship that it wants more than it wants nukes.

Update: A good friend forwards this link to Hecker’s full report.