Look Who's Got The Bomb

KREMLIN PRESS SERVICE/ITAR-TASS/REUTERS
Leader Kim Jong-il has brazenly built nukes forbidden in a 1994 agreement

Trial lawyers preach a cardinal principle: never ask a question to which you don't know the answer. Diplomats generally operate on the same basis. So when the Bush Administration presented evidence to North Korean leaders on Oct. 3 that their country was developing nuclear weapons, it expected the regime to lie about it. A day later came the shocker. Yes, we've been secretly working to produce nukes, a top aide to "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il told astonished U.S. envoy James Kelly. And, headded, we've got "more powerful" weapons presumably meaning biological and chemical agents to boot. He was not apologetic at all, says a U.S. official, but "assertive, aggressive about it."

Tightly controlled countries like North Korea typically stonewall such sensitive inquiries. So the admission did more than just confirm long-held suspicions in Washington that North Korea, a charter member in Bush's "axis of evil," had pursued weapons of mass destruction despite a 1994 agreement to stop. The revelation also jerked a preoccupied world to attention. Why, everyone wondered, was Kim confessing now? And why had Bush pressed the issue, when he was already immersed in two major global confrontations? No wonder the Administration sat on the news for 12 days while it scrambled to figure out how to downsize the crisis. By the time the Bush team went public with the news last week, it was also trying to reassure citizens and allies that this standoff would be addressed, at least for now, with diplomacy, not military might.

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Mistrust of North Korea has been a bedrock U.S. policy since war on the Korean peninsula ended in 1953. Pyongyang's erratic behavior consistently confirms such skepticism. The latest confrontation was quite deliberate, says a senior Bush aide. For more than two years, the CIA had been collecting shards of information suggesting that North Korea was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons, despite the 1994 Agreed Framework requiring Pyongyang to freeze its program to extract plutonium from reprocessed reactor fuel. (The CIA has long thought that North Korea made and kept one or two plutonium-based bombs from before 1994.)

But North Korea apparently figured it could obtain nukes another way: using the slower but more easily hidden method of enriching uranium to weapons grade in gas centrifuges the same method some now accuse Saddam Hussein of pursuing. To accomplish that, the reclusive North Koreans needed to buy know-how and equipment abroad, including high-strength aluminum for the whirling centrifuges. By late July, the CIA had picked up enough tip-offs to conclude that Pyongyang was procuring banned supplies. By late summer, a Bush aide says, "things fell in place, and we could say, Aha!"

So who assisted the Koreans? U.S. officials suspect Pakistan. China and Russia also make centrifuges, but surely neither wants a nuclear-armed North Korea next door. Islamabad and Pyongyang, however, made natural partners: Pakistan had the Bomb but no missiles to deliver it, and North Korea is the world's most active missile proliferator, especially to customers who can't shop elsewhere. In 1998 Pakistan tested a homemade Ghauri medium-range ballistic missile that the U.S. believes originated in North Korea.

That doesn't mean the deal was government to government. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf denies that his regime supplied Pyongyang's enrichment program. But in 1998 Washington slapped sanctions on the lab of Abdul Qadir Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's Bomb. As head of the nation's nuclear program, he made the Ghauri as a carbon copy of North Korea's Nodong missile, say U.S. officials. Khan is believed to have established front companies and smuggling operations to gather and sell nuclear gear and blueprints. Musharraf forced his resignation as the lab's leader 18 months ago.

The Bush Administration has flip-flopped on North Korea. It recently had agreed to resume talks with Pyongyang, suspended since early 2001. But when Assistant Secretary of State Kelly took off for North Korea in early October, the purpose of his mission had changed dramatically. The CIA had briefed Bush in August about its new intelligence on Pyongyang's secret enrichment program. The President decided to confront Kim with the evidence, but the Administration first shared it with several congressional leaders and key countries that the U.S. would need to help lean on Pyongyang: Japan, South Korea, China and Russia.

The stakes couldn't be higher. War with North Korea, Bush told his aides, was out of the question. He could not let Kim alter the fragile balance of power on the Korean peninsula, where 37,000 U.S. troops stand across the DMZ from a million-man army close enough to destroy Seoul, South Korea's capital, in a blitzkreig. By Bush's own doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. should strike against any state with weapons of mass destruction and an irresponsible dictator. But the consequences of attacking Pyongyang are unacceptable. What Bush apparently never anticipated was a brazen admission that the evidence was right.