Miguel
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Next Question: How to Stop Nuclear Blackmail
By DAVID E. SANGER
ASHINGTON — Imagine this scene in the Oval Office three weeks from now. At the daily intelligence briefing, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, opens with some highly unpleasant but hardly unexpected news. The North Koreans have started up their nuclear reprocessor, and will be churning out a bomb's worth of plutonium every month, until summer.
By the time President Bush cleans up in Iraq, Mr. Tenet would likely tell him, North Korea will probably produce enough bomb-grade material to produce five or six weapons that can be added to the one or two the C.I.A. believes the North probably produced in the early 1990's. That is enough, as one of Mr. Bush's top aides says, to "hide three, conduct an underground test of one and offer to sell the rest."
In fact, last month, Mr. Tenet and the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, told Congress that North Korea might not even bother to turn all the plutonium it is likely to produce into warheads.
To achieve its objectives — getting Washington's undivided attention, diplomatic recognition and aid — all North Korea really has to do is hide a few nukes and leave Americans to wonder what they've got, and whether they are offering it to customers like Al Qaeda or Hamas. Call it the virtual nuclear deterrent.
To Mr. Bush's mind, this is why it makes sense to take on Iraq first — before it gets what North Korea already has. Yet if confronting Iraq is the first step in Mr. Bush's war on rogue states with nuclear ambitions, North Korea is the first in his war against nuclear blackmail. And those are very different campaigns.
In Iraq, Mr. Bush vowed to disarm the regime. Even if it takes a war, the big question is how to minimize the casualties, the backlash and the damage to American alliances. In North Korea, the question is whether the country can be disarmed at all, because the president's options range from bad to awful to incredibly dangerous.
Put another way, North Korea may be the far more challenging test of the notion that the United States right now has an opportunity to reorder the world so that it will never again face these kinds of threats.
Successfully facing down North Korea would send a message that the world will not tolerate nuclear blackmail. Failing to do so would send a very different message to rogue states — that if you don't want to be treated like Iraq, get your bomb before facing off against Washington.
"Kim Jong Il thinks that was Saddam's big mistake," said Gary Samore, an expert on nonproliferation in the Clinton administration who is now a scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
So when Mr. Kim flips on that reprocessor, what are Mr. Bush's options?
The first is to ignore the issue — always a favorite choice in Washington. Few in the administration believe Mr. Kim will start a nuclear war, because he values survival. And as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, "You can't eat plutonium."
True, but as Mr. Powell's own deputy pointed out to Congress, North Korea has sold just about everything it has ever developed, including ballistic missiles. No one knows just what a few baseball-sized lumps of plutonium would bring, but it would bring a lot — with plenty left over to perfect those missiles until they can reach Los Angeles. And the exports would be nearly impossible to stop: someone could just walk the plutonium over the Chinese border in an ox-cart, assuming that no starving North Koreans eat the ox first.
Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard scholar who worked on the now-failed 1994 nuclear freeze agreement with the North, points to another problem: If North Korea collapsed, there would be a scramble for the loose nuclear material. "The half-life of Plutonium-239 is 24,400 years," he said. "What is the half-life of the North Korean regime?"
Sooner or later, North Korea's neighbors would see its arsenal as a reason to rethink their own policies.
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Romans 9:11-24
Our Eschatology may vary even our Ecclesiology may be disputed among us but our Soteriology most assume a singularity and exclusivity which in biblical term is known as Quote; "The Narrow Way" and Quote!
Posts: 2792 | From: Stockton,Ca | Registered: Jun 2002
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