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Hermit Kingdom gave Libya enriched uranium
Even hawks within the administration - a group led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said on a trip to Asia last month that "time is not necessarily on our side" - see no major risk that North Korea will lash out at its neighbors or the United States. The country is broke; American military officials say it can barely afford the jet fuel to give its fighter pilots time to train. Iraq, too, was in desperate economic straits, but it at least had oil revenue, skimmed from the United Nations oil-for-food program, and active trade. North Korea is literally starving; millions have died of malnutrition. But the same poverty that makes North Korea less of a military threat makes it a potent proliferation threat. For years, the North's main export has been missiles. It has sold them to Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Libya and others, often sending its engineers abroad to fabricate custom designs. The reports of likely uranium sales to Libya have created the chilling possibility that the North has now found a new and profitable product - and that Libya may not have been the only customer. "Many predicted that sooner or later we would have to worry about the North Koreans not only as users but as exporters of nuclear technology," said Daniel Poneman, a former national security official and co-author of "Going Critical" (Brookings Institution Press, 2004), a new book about the first North Korean nuclear crisis in the mid-1990's. It was this fear that Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage expressed to Congress last year, when he warned that North Korea would not have to develop complete nuclear arms to become a serious threat; it could sell ingredients. In short, if the North's sales to Libya are confirmed, the nightmare that Mr. Bush discussed so often last year - the sale of "the world's worst weapons to the world's most dangerous dictators" - may be happening at the other end of the axis. Iraq, it turns out, had little or nothing to sell. Mr. Bush has addressed the issue chiefly through an agreement among a growing number of nations to intercept suspected shipments of illegal weapons, nuclear parts or chemical precursors. The United States, Germany and Italy stopped a shipment of nuclear equipment to Libya last year, apparently convincing Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to give up his nuclear program. Administration officials disagree, saying that North Korea should not be rewarded for cheating on its past nuclear agreements and must begin dismantling weapons before it sees any economic benefits. So far this has been a prescription for stalemate. But many in the administration agree that Mr. Kim has his own reasons for not seeking a deal this year: the North Korean leader is presumed to be rooting for Mr. Bush's defeat in November, in hopes he will face a more willing negotiating partner in John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee. The risk is that by the time the two countries re-engage, North Korea could have six or eight more weapons, according to the most dire estimates in the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, a view that more cautious intelligence analysts say is based more on conjecture about the North's engineering skills than any real intelligence. Such a number could let the North keep one or two for its own use, and have more to sell, in whole or parts, which is a very different position. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-05-24 |
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