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| WSJ: The Arms-Control Illusion |
| 2006-10-14 |
| A short history of nonproliferation failure. North Korea's apparent test of a nuclear weapon has once more put the international arms control system in the hot seat. This week the U.N. Security Council did muster 13 votes condemning the test, whatever that means, and today it is expected to vote on new nonmilitary sanctions against Pyongyang. This is better than nothing, though how much better depends on the fine print and the political will to enforce it. China and Russia objected at first to the sternest punishment, especially to inspections of North Korean cargo ships and tough financial sanctions. But according to reports yesterday, the U.N. resolution will allow at least some of these searches. The good news here is that at long last the U.N. is attempting to enforce its own nonproliferation regime. Before the multilateralists get too pleased, however, it's worth recalling that it took an actual nuclear blast following a long-range missile test this summer to motivate the Security Council to take even these modest actions. Years of North Korean cheating on its treaty commitments hadn't been enough. We mention this because the cases of North Korea and Iran are revealing the limits of arms control treaties in restraining rogue states bent on gaining nuclear weapons and other WMD. In the wake of Korea's nuclear test, we are hearing renewed calls for "direct" talks between the U.S. and North Korea akin to those that took place in the 1990s. The idea is to get North Korea to sign another agreement promising to give up its nukes. But one reason we're at the current pass is because Kim Jong Il violated the many commitments he made to the Clinton Administration. Even as it allowed inspectors at its Yongban nuclear facility, Pyongyang was pursuing a separate and secret bomb-building effort. When the world objected once that effort was exposed, North Korea responded by shutting off the U.N. cameras at Yongban, expelling the inspectors and withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Meanwhile, because the 1994 Agreed Framework had allowed North Korea to keep its plutonium under U.N. "safeguards," Pyongyang was then free to make a bomb with that nuclear fuel. Now it apparently has done so, unless this too turns out to be another lie. The case of Iran has followed a similar arc of deception and U.N. failure. Tehran also signed the NPT, only to pursue its own secret bomb-building effort. The U.N. inspectors working inside Iran didn't discover any of this until they were tipped off by an Iranian opposition group that clearly had better intelligence than the U.N. The International Atomic Energy Agency has since produced report after report documenting Iran's violation and deception, and, under the explicit terms of the NPT, Tehran should have been referred immediately to the Security Council. Yet the IAEA declined to do so for years. And only this summer, after Iran repeatedly rejected European entreaties to stop enriching uranium, did the Security Council finally agree to cite Iran for its arms-control violations. That resolution set an August 31 deadline for Iran to stop enriching uranium, promising dire consequences. But Iran keeps enriching, and so far the U.N. keeps begging it to cooperate. If neither Tehran nor Pyongyang takes these U.N. warnings seriously, this is why. The latest U.N. excuse for doing little is fear that Iran will withdraw from the NPT, as North Korea did--and then where would we be?But at least then Iran would have been forced to brand itself an international rogue, instead of using the NPT as a fig leaf to buy more time to fulfill its obvious nuclear ambitions. If arms control won't stop rogue bomb makers, what can? Well, regime change for one. Saddam Hussein is no longer a potential nuclear threat to anyone because he no longer runs Iraq. But short of deposing a regime, the most successful policy has been the Bush Administration's Proliferation Security Initiative. Operated out of the Pentagon on a "coalition of the willing" basis, PSI helped blow the whistle on Libya's clandestine nuclear program, rolled up A.Q. Khan's nuclear black market and has interdicted North Korean weapons shipments. The difference between this and the NPT is that the PSI doesn't give the feckless or evil a veto over what it does. It is a coalition of countries with a shared sense of purpose, and above all the willingness to act. The world will need more such cooperation and creative thinking to contain a proliferation threat that is only going to grow. But the beginning of wisdom is to realize that the threat hasn't ended merely because a rogue regime signs an arms-control treaty. |
| Posted by:.com |