Nuclear Fallout

Michael Richardson (Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore)

(This article originally appeared in the February 14, 2004 issue of South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and is reproduced here with permission from the publisher)

Continuing revelations about clandestine international trafficking in technology and equipment to build nuclear weapons will put added pressure on North Korea to come clean, in negotiations due to resume in Beijing this month, about the full extent of its programme.

In his televised confession last week, Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan said that he had sold nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. According to Pakistani government and intelligence sources, all three received equipment over the last 15 years that was either exported illegally from Pakistan or procured abroad by Dr Khan and his associates. It included centrifuges for enriching uranium so it can be used in nuclear warheads.

In the case of Libya, US officials say that the Pakistan-based supply network provided not just centrifuge systems but also warhead designs, although of a relatively crude type.

It is not yet clear whether North Korea also received Dr Khan's blueprint for making a uranium bomb. This is one of the things Washington wants to find out. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday that the Pakistan government had done quite a bit to roll up the nuclear weapons supply network. But he added that he had told Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf that "we wanted to learn as much as we could about what Dr Khan and the network was up to, and it has to be pulled up by its roots and examined to make sure that we have left nothing behind".

The United States has amassed evidence that Pakistan was a key source of uranium enrichment technology and hardware for North Korea, evidently in exchange for North Korean ballistic missiles needed by Pakistan's military to provide a reliable delivery system for its nuclear warheads. With a range of more than 1,000km, the North Korean No-dong missile enabled Pakistan to target New Delhi and Mumbai - the two main cities of its nuclear rival and longtime adversary, India.

The Federation of American Scientists and other experts have said that Pakistan's Ghauri missile series is a copy of North Korea's No-dong missile. Pakistan has denied this. It also denied this week that it had delivered nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for missiles. Pyongyang, too, insisted that reports of its nuclear dealings with Islamabad were fabricated.

But more disclosures about the Pakistan-North Korean connection are likely as international efforts intensify to unravel and shut the nuclear black market. This must worry Pyongyang, which has acknowledged that it has a programme to make nuclear weapons from plutonium but refutes reports that it is developing a uranium-based one.

China, too, has refused to accept the US contention that North Korea has a two-track programme. However, Beijing's position, which Washington has described as unhelpful, may shift as more evidence comes to light. China's role is crucial because it is by far the largest foreign supplier of fuel and food to North Korea and is hosting the six-party talks due to resume on February 25. The other participants are the US, Russia, Japan and South Korea.

American insistence, based on intelligence, that North Korea was pursuing uranium enrichment for bomb-making triggered the current crisis in October 2002.

Pyongyang had agreed to freeze its plutonium production under a 1994 accord with Washington and has offered to do so again in return for political and economic rewards. But the Bush administration is adamant that there must be a complete, verifiable and irreversible end of both plutonium and uranium bomb-making in North Korea.

The US case was buttressed this week when a senior North Korean defector told a Japanese newspaper that the North launched its uranium-based programme in 1996 with the help of Pakistan. Hwang Jang-yop, a former mentor to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, said that not long before he escaped to South Korea, a top military official told him about the deal with Pakistan. "Jon Pyong-ho [a member of North Korea's National Defence Committee and a secretary of the ruling Workers' Party] came to me, as the person responsible for international affairs, asking: `Can we buy some more plutonium from Russia or somewhere? I want to make a few more nuclear bombs'," the newspaper quoted Mr Hwang as saying.

"But then, before the autumn of 1996, he said, `We've solved a big problem. We don't need plutonium this time. Due to an agreement with Pakistan, we will use uranium'." Mr Hwang, who defected in 1997, was a former chief of North Korea's legislature.