There he is, your next IAEA DG: Yukia Amano, Japan’s ambassador to the IAEA. Unfortunately, it seems he was elected without the benefit of a strong consensus.

Good luck, Amb. Amano.

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From Roger Cohen in the IHT:

[Mohsen Mahmoudi, a 34-year-old conservative cleric] told me that when he went to study in Qom, he had no idea what Iran’s nuclear program was. But there were regular classes on it. Scientists were brought in to enlighten the clerics. They were sensitized. The aim was that “We go back to towns and villages and talk in the mosques about the people’s nuclear rights.”

“It’s because Ahmadinjad stood for this that he became a hero to many,” Mahmoudi said. “He equated it with the nationalization of our oil industry and made it the core symbol of our independence and pride.”

He did a pretty good job of it, too. In 2002, vanishingly few Iranians would have been aware of the uranium enrichment program — a closely held secret, despite the suspicions of Western officials. By 2007 or so, it was the beating heart of the nation. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made it the centerpiece of his re-election campaign. So it’s only the more remarkable that it didn’t work.

Musical bonus.

Comment

Receiving Israeli President Shimon Peres in Astana today, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev gave an assurance that “no nuclear material will reach Iran from our territory.” That’s good to know, since Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been courting Kazakhstan recently, visiting Astana in early April.

The President of K’stan also took a moment to reflect on the legacy of his own country’s nuclear disarmament:

“After independence 18 years ago, Kazakhstan voluntarily gave up the fourth-largest nuclear stockpile in the world. We set an example for the world, but unfortunately that example wasn’t followed,” he said.

According to the version of his remarks in Yediot Ahronot, he added that “The Non-Proliferation Treaty lacks teeth.”

Kazakhstan Today quoted Nazarbayev describing his country as a victim of nuclear weapons:

“Kazakhstan itself suffered from the consequences of the nuclear tests – for 49 years. More than one million Kazakhstan citizens suffered from radiation due to the explosions on the Semipalatinsk range, therefore, the issue of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons – for us very important,” the President of Kazakhstan said.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post shared this worthwhile anecdote:

“When (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad was here for a state visit, I told him that even if he had enough material for 10 nuclear bombs, it wouldn’t bring him security. We improved our security by giving up nukes.”

Here’s hoping that Iran’s President isn’t a Spinal Tap fan.

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Today, the Department of State sanctioned North Korea’s Namchongang Trading Corporation — an importer of aluminum tubes, it seems — while the Department of Treasury sanctioned a North Korean front company, Hong Kong Electronics. Reading not very deeply between the lines of the Treasury press release, HKE funnels cash for Iranian missile purchases back to North Korea:

Since 2007, Hong Kong Electronics has transferred millions of dollars of proliferation-related funds on behalf of Tanchon and KOMID. Hong Kong Electronics has also facilitated the movement of money from Iran to North Korea on behalf of KOMID. Tanchon, a commercial bank based in Pyongyang, North Korea, is the financial arm for KOMID – North Korea’s premier arms dealer and main exporter of goods and equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons.

What’s interesting about HKE is where it’s located: Kish Island, Iran. What, Dubai wasn’t available?

Kish Island also happens to be where American private investigator Bob Levinson was disappeared in 2007.

Comment [1]

According to David Sanger in the NYT, some folks in the Administration are thinking very carefully about the intelligence problem in interdiction:

Pentagon officials are clearly not eager to confront the Kang Nam 1. The intelligence about what is on board is typically murky. Some say they suspect small arms, which are banned by the United Nations resolution but hardly a major threat. Members of Mr. Obama’s team who served in the Clinton administration remember past embarrassments, including the interception of a Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical precursors in the early 1990s. When the ship was finally cornered, the cargo turned out to be benign.

That’s the Yinhe incident, for those of you keeping score at home.

X-posted to ACW.

Comment

In the last two months, the North Korean Foreign Ministry has had some things to say about light-water reactors and uranium enrichment.

Back on April 29, it was announced that, in response to the Security Council Presidential Statement of April 13,

the DPRK will make a decision to build a light water reactor power plant and start the technological development for ensuring self-production of nuclear fuel as its first process without delay.

On June 13, in response to UNSCR 1874, it was further announced that

The process of uranium enrichment will be commenced.

Pursuant to the decision to build its own light-water reactor, enough success has been made in developing uranium enrichment technology to provide nuclear fuel to allow the experimental procedure.

That Was Quick

Actually, what’s surprising is that it took so long to hear these declarations. Readers of this blog are probably already familiar with the history of North Korea’s uranium enrichment-related acquisition activities and the dispute surrounding them, which served as the proximate cause of the end of the Agreed Framework. In the face of American accusations that North Korea had started a HEU-based program for weapons-making, it would have been quite easy for the North Koreans to have said, “Sure, we’re interested in uranium enrichment. We want to make our own fuel for the two LWRs you’ve agreed to build us. Don’t get so excited.”

This is, after all, essentially what the Iranians have done when confronted with the evidence of their own enrichment activities.

Not that anyone would have believed the North Koreans then, or believes them now. Indeed, much of the news media simply read past the LWR cover story and reported (erroneously) that North Korea had openly threatened to start enriching uranium to make more nuclear weapons. This is an understandable mistake, as the LWR and enrichment statements were presented as gestures of defiance, offered alongside threats of an unambiguously military nuclear character.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

So now that the plutonium cat is out of the bag, and North Korea demands recognition as a nuclear power, why suddenly introduce the LWR fuel pretense, at long last? Why not say instead, “We’re going to make HEU for hydrogen bomb secondaries”?

As Peter Hayes and colleagues view it, and as Jeff Goldstein argues in the latest issue of the Bulletin, the LWR supply demand — which dates back to the Agreed Framework — is a pride thing and an assurance of respect. If the U.S. and its allies insist that North Korea give up its existing plutonium production reactor, the reasoning goes, they must compensate it with a top-of-the-line power reactor — even if it can’t plausibly make use of it thanks to the decrepitude of the DPRK power grid. During the wrangling over the “Joint Declaration” of September 2005, the North Koreans simply insisted on LWRs before disarmament:

The U.S. should not even dream of the issue of the DPRK’s dismantlement of its nuclear deterrent before providing LWRs, a physical guarantee for confidence-building.

So it follows that the upsurge in LWR rhetoric is an assertion of self-reliance. “We’re done waiting for you. We’ll build it for ourselves!”

LWR-speak is also a hint that North Korea probably has a long way to go before it can make HEU in respectable quantities, and perhaps no foreseeable prospects at all. They’re not over-promising. In fact, they’re not promising anything externally verifiable at all, insofar as they’re almost certainly never going to be able to complete a LWR by themselves. No LWR = no obvious lack of LWR fuel.

There are other possible explanations for LWR-speak. I’ll return to this topic again later.

Comment [3]

Just a day or two ago, Chinese and American defense officials agreed to hold talks on avoiding military incidents at sea. That’s great timing, since the new issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is out, including an article by yours truly that recommends the U.S. and China hold talks on… avoiding military incidents at sea. And also some other stuff besides.

Subscribers — or those willing to pay per article — can read it here.

Yes, this was well-planned.

Comment

Thanks to the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party,* suddenly there’s a debate in Britain about whether to retain nuclear weapons, in the form of a follow-on strategic submarine program. (The PONI blog has the story covered.)

Making the case against disarmament in The Times is one Sash Tusa, whose case, while illogical, is interesting:

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France) achieved their positions by being the victors of the Second World War. But they now retain those seats only thanks to their possession of credible nuclear deterrents. It’s not about GDP, hospitals, improvements in child poverty or school league tables: abandon the deterrent and, sooner or later, Britain loses its seat.

Now, how exactly does that work? Does the IAEA come along take the Security Council seat away? The Tooth Fairy, maybe?

The Security Council is not the S&P 500. Those contestants with veto power cannot be voted off the island.

But the factual truth pales before the psychological truth, whose implications go well beyond Britain. In this realm, nukes = status. It’s the Alpha Dog principle. If I can thrash you at will, then you have to be nice to me at all times, whereas I’m under no such compulsion. This makes me Somebody and you Nobody.

It would be understandably tough for any country to bow its head before fiscal, political, or other realities that might impinge on maintaining this sacred symbol of national manhood. The psychological realities are just so powerful that it’s remarkable that the thing has ever been done. Unilateral disarmament is tantamount to national self-abasement. That it has taken place in the context of regime capitulation is perhaps not so surprising.

There’s something almost childish about this, but mass politics does have a lot to do with emotions. Disarmament is the other nuclear taboo.

*Britain’s perennial third party, out of power since 1922.

Comment [1]

It must be that time of year already: Silly Season, when precious newspaper real estate gets clogged with giddy nothings.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times each dispatched a West Coast correspondent to sunny Hawaii, the better to gauge public anxiety about an imminent missile attack from North Korea. Amazingly, everyone out there seems pretty much unfazed. Must be the “laid-back culture.” Hope you enjoyed the trip, guys.

(Maybe they just needed to work harder. The Associated Press found some hysterics. Why couldn’t two of our nation’s top publications?)

So where do they get this stuff? I’ll tell you where: Yomiuri Shimbun, by way of the Associated Press. That, and a momentary suspension of critical faculties. One didn’t have to read that story too closely to notice that it was perhaps not the brightest moment in the history of Japanese journalism.

Yeah. North Korea’s going to attack America. With two missiles. That’ll be interesting.

I guess it was irresistible. Armageddon in Paradise!

Man up, people. It’s a missile test, for crying out loud.

Annals of Threat Magnification

In fairness to the junketeers and their editors our intrepid news sleuths, the Secretary of Defense made it sound like he was taking the threat seriously:

Dr. Gates, I wondered what you thought about the report that North Korea might shoot a ballistic missile toward Hawaii, if you thought there was any accuracy to that. And if that was to occur, would that be a situation where the U.S. would use its missile defense system, to eliminate that test?

SEC. GATES: Well, we’re obviously watching the situation in the North, with respect to missile launches, very closely. And we do have some concerns, if they were to launch a missile to the (sic – east), in the direction of Hawaii.

I’ve directed the deployment again of THAAD missiles to Hawaii. And the SBX Radar has deployed, away from Hawaii, to provide support. Based on my visit to Fort Greely, the ground-based interceptors are clearly in a position to take action.

So without telegraphing what we will do, I would just say, we are — I think we are in a good position, should it become necessary to protect American territory.

(The President has lately gotten in on this game, too.)

Let’s just say that this course of action appears to reflect a superabundance of caution. Looking at it another way, since we’ve built the systems, what would be the point of not deploying them? But what really interests me is the word “again,” as in, “I’ve directed the deployment again of THAAD missiles to Hawaii.”

One shouldn’t make too much of a single word. Gates could have misspoken, or his comments could have been erroneously transcribed. But it sounds like this isn’t the first time. Should we conclude that THAAD was first temporarily deployed in anticipation of the April 2009 Unha-2 launch?

The first THAAD battery was formally activated back at Ft. Bliss, Texas, in May 2008, but we don’t know where it normally operates. Some THAAD testing has taken place in Hawaii.

Update: The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has more details.

A Live Intercept Test?

Regardless of where North Korea’s missiles fly, if anyone is really thinking of trying out missile defense systems on them — whether to make a point, or just to see what they can do — I would not recommend it. Right now, it’s North Korea’s strategy to ratchet up tensions, and America’s strategy to act like a responsible adult. THAAD is not a toy. Still less is GMD.

Fortunately, though, I don’t think that the concerns that apply to North American GMD scenarios apply to Pacific GMD scenarios. Put your mind at rest.

Musical bonus.

Comment [1]

After the last week’s extraordinary events, the following is irrelevant, but it might be worth stating regardless.

It’s been said here and there that Mir-Hossein Moussavi would have been no more enlightened in foreign relations — including the nuclear issue — than the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This otherwise perceptive and enlightening article went so far as to say that Ahmadinejad would be better able to repair relations with the West. (Better able, maybe. At all interested? He’s got a funny way of showing it.)

Common sense indicates that virtually anyone would be better than Ahmadinejad. The Obama Administration’s approach during Iran’s campaign season made sense: neither to shake a fist nor to extend an embrace. This approach avoided validating Ahmadinejad during the campaign. The failure of his let-them-eat-yellowcake politics seems all too clear now.

Half a Loaf is Better Than None

Setting aside the nuances of the suspension issue and focusing just on outcomes, there are two issues at stake, broadly speaking:

• Will the nuclear fuel cycle continue to be operated in Iran?

• What sort of safeguards will be in place?

The safeguards issue includes monitoring against diversion at declared sites (notably the enrichment plant at Natanz) and detection of undeclared sites and activities (by such means as the adoption of the Additional Protocol). I’m simplifying a bit, that that’s the basic picture.

In my view, at least, the safeguards issue is of the essence. Consider what would be more reassuring: Shutting down Natanz while keeping the IAEA confined to a handful of declared sites? Or continuing to operate Natanz, while giving inspectors considerably expanded access? Again, that’s a simplification, but it gives the outlines of the picture.

Bearing that in mind, Ahmadinejad has shown no signs of relenting on either issue. (Here’s the latest on Natanz.) Whereas Moussavi, who campaigned on improving Iran’s foreign relations, has expressed willingness to negotiate on safeguards:

How would you remove tensions then?

Progress in nuclear technology and its peaceful use is the right of all countries and nations. This is what we have painfully achieved with our own efforts. No one will retreat. But we have to see what solutions or in other words what guarantees can be found to verify the non-diversion of the programme into nuclear weapons.

What kind of solutions?

They can be reached in technical negotiations.

This is not a small difference. But it seems like a moot point now. The present crisis has gone well beyond who occupies the Iranian presidency.

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