Enriching Knowledge of North Korea
Washington,
Nov 22 -
"Some people imagine there is a building somewhere with a secret door they can open and find a group of scantily clad women enriching uranium."
-reported remarks by nuclear negotiator Chris Hill in April 2008, downplaying North Korea’s uranium enrichment activities.
"The first look…was stunning. Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges all neatly aligned and plumbed."
- Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford professor who recently visited a North Korean enrichment facility.
Hecker must have missed the women among the centrifuges.
A brief refresher: In 2002, the Bush Administration confronted North Korea over its secret uranium enrichment program, in violation of President Clinton’s 1994 "Agreed Framework," intended to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. North Korea walked away and went on pursuing weapons from spent plutonium. (Remember, two paths to a bomb: plutonium or enriched uranium).
Late in its second term, the Bush Administration entered Six Party diplomatic talks to put the lid on North Korea’s plutonium program. Enriched uranium was dismissed as a sideshow, as so colorfully put by Ambassador Hill above. I remember his push-back well. Congressional Democrats claimed that the uranium concerns a few of us raised was hardliner hype.
Well, the clear-eyed observers were right. North Korea has now opened the "secret door" for visiting Americans to reveal an "ultra-modern" enrichment facility.
If it wasn’t before, it's now clear that State Department officials were intentionally misleading about North Korea’s enrichment program in their zeal for any nuclear deal. Or the intelligence agencies have been blind on North Korea. Either way, you'd think the diplomats would lay low.
Not so. The Obama Administration just sent North Korea envoy Ambassador Stephen Bosworth to Asia to consult with Six Party negotiating partners, where he promptly said, "I would never declare any process dead. It’s still breathing, and I still think we have hope that we’re going to be able to resuscitate it." Ah, despite the facts, the diplomat’s eternal faith in negotiations with North Korea … or hubris.
