Did Iran test a nuke in North Korea?

It would be a very serious matter if Iran had tested a nuclear weapon in North Korea in 2010, as this German language report in Die Welt claims. The claim has received much less attention in the U.S. press than it would seem to merit, and most bloggers who have picked up the story have merely wondered aloud whether it could be true (the notable exception being Stephan Haggard). I’ll add my summation of the evidence to Stephan’s, but I’ll also leverage the OFK archives to add some additional circumstantial evidence suggesting that the claim, though not proven, is plausible.

The best translation/summary of the claim is at the Jerusalem Post, of all places, and it tells us a bit more about the source of this allegation, a man named Hans Ruhle, “who directed the planning department of the German Defense Ministry from 1982 to 1988,” and who it claims is “widely respected among defense and security officials in Germany.” Drilling down further, the article claims that “some” or “many” intelligence agencies incline to the view that Iran has tested a nuke in North Korea, although the article tells us nothing about which agencies arrived at that view, or what the evidentiary basis for that view is. European intelligence agencies seldom have the reach that ours do, so they often get their intelligence second-hand, from the CIA. In this case, however, the conclusion may be based on open sources. This particular claim appears to originate, at least in part, from Swedish Nuclear Physicist Lars-Erik de Geer, who spent a year studying data from a private network of radioisotope-monitoring stations before publishing his conclusions in the British scientific journal Nature.

Remember that weird story back in May of 2010, when the North Koreans claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion? Most observers ridiculed the story, but that network of monitoring stations picked up some anomalies that lent the claim some corroboration:

The news was largely ridiculed in the South Korean and Western media — but it was not so quickly dismissed by the small circle of experts who devote their careers to identifying covert nuclear tests. South Korean scientists had detected a whiff of radioactive xenon at around that time, hinting at nuclear activity in its northern neighbour, which had already tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.

In August 2010, experts meeting in Vienna informally discussed the South Korean data and measurements from an international network of radioisotope-monitoring stations operated by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which supports an as-yet-unratified treaty that seeks to ban nuclear-weapons testing. Among those experts was Lars-Erik De Geer, an atmospheric scientist at the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Stockholm. When they looked at the monitoring data from Russian and Japanese stations close to North Korea, “the conclusion from everyone was, ‘Hell, we cannot explain them.'”, De Geer recalls.

Unwilling to let the matter rest, De Geer took the radioisotope data and compared them with the South Korean reports, as well as meteorological records. After a year of work, he has concluded that North Korea carried out two small nuclear tests in April and May 2010 that caused explosions in the range of 50″“200 tonnes of TNT equivalent. The types and ratios of isotopes detected, he says, suggest that North Korea was testing materials and techniques intended to boost the yield of its weapons. His paper will appear in the April/May issue of the journal Science and Global Security. [Nature, ht Israel Matsav]

Significantly, De Geer claimed that this was indicative of a test of a small uranium device, “in the range of 50-200 tons of TNT.” You may have heard those stories about North Korea having a uranium enrichment program, but as everyone now knows, Dick Cheney and John Bolton made it all up.

Having gotten that out of my system, I’ll add that a test of this size probably wouldn’t register as much more than background noise on a seismograph (small earthquakes are very common). By comparison, North Korea’s 2009 test measured a modest 4.7 on the Richter scale after a yield estimated between 2 and 8 kilotons. Its 2006 test registered 4.2, at a yield of just under a kiloton.

Interestingly enough, this is not the first published report of Iran testing a nuke in North Korea. Back in 2007, the London Daily Telegraph reported this:

North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year. Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran’s nuclear scientists. [….]

A senior European defence official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October’s underground test to assist Teheran’s preparations to conduct its own — possibly by the end of this year.

There were unconfirmed reports at the time of the Korean firing that an Iranian team was present. Iranian military advisers regularly visit North Korea to participate in missile tests. Now the long-standing military co-operation between the countries has been extended to nuclear issues. As a result, senior western military officials are deeply concerned that the North Koreans’ technical superiority will allow the Iranians to accelerate development of their own nuclear weapon.

“The Iranians are working closely with the North Koreans to study the results of last year’s North Korean nuclear bomb test,” said the European defence official. [The Telegraph]

There have been long-standing suspicions of nuclear cooperation between Iran and North Korea, and there is conclusive evidence of nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Iran’s ally Syria, possibly enabled with Iranian funding.

Would North Korea cross the line to joint nuclear testing with other countries? Some in our intelligence community have long believed that North Korea conducted its first nuclear test way back in 1998. In Pakistan.

North Korea’s proliferation relationship with Iran is broad and deep. There have been reports of North Korean technicians working in Iran, and vice versa. Most of the cooperation that’s been described in open sources relates to the countries’ missile programs, but according to multiple published reports, Iran and North Korea have a long cooperative relationship in the development of chemical weapons, including a mysterious explosion in Syria in 2004, reported cooperation in putting chemical warheads on missiles, and North Korea shipping chemical protective suits to Iran’s closest ally, Syria.

Most of this evidence is circumstantial. It doesn’t confirm the latest report, but it certainly makes it plausible. And given the reason why we can’t confirm any of this, I tend not to assign North Korea and Iran the benefit of the doubt.