News Analysis: Doubts on dismantling N. Korea's arsenal

News Analysis: Doubts on dismantling N. Korea's arsenal
By Donald Greenlees
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: February 15, 2007


HONG KONG: For decades, North Korea badgered its communist allies to supply it with a nuclear reactor and the technical know-how that could have allowed it to build a nuclear bomb. It eventually achieved both.

After such a long struggle, North Korea is unlikely to easily agree to dismantle the weapons it possesses, despite an agreement this week to start the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, analysts said.

They said that at best it would require long and arduous negotiations, and further diplomatic and economic concessions, before North Korea would agree to dismantle its stockpile of nuclear weapons, without any certainty that it was fully disclosing the extent of its nuclear weapons capability. The agreement has been widely criticized for failing to directly address the issue of scrapping the nuclear weapons already built by North Korea.

But Joseph Bermudez, an expert on the North Korean military and a senior analyst with Janes Information Group, said Washington had been "desperate" to get a deal as time was running out for six-nation talks in the nuclear crisis to make progress and it had "settled for less than could be had."

"I believe the North Koreans will say dismantling nuclear weapons is not in the letter of the agreement," he said in an interview.

North Korea agreed on Tuesday to shut down and seal its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and an associated plutonium reprocessing plant in the next 60 days. Eventually, they are to be abandoned. It also agreed to furnish a "list of all its nuclear programs."

But the deal omitted explicit mention of what would happen to the stockpile of up to a dozen nuclear warheads that North Korea is suspected of possessing. This appears to have been left to one of several working groups set up under the agreement for further talks.

"The word weapon or disarmament doesn't seem to be anywhere in the agreement," said Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst and specialist on Korean security at the RAND Corporation. "So what we have agreed, at least in the letter of the law, is to stop their production but not necessarily to get rid of what they already have."

But, he said, the agreement is likely to limit the North's capacity to build new weapons and that alone has the potential to improve regional security.

Bennett cited two factors behind the argument that forcing North Korea to stop further weapons production will contribute to a better security climate. The first is that there will be less temptation for either South Korea or Japan to reverse policy and seek their own nuclear deterrent forces.

There have been concerns that if the North's program goes unchecked, South Korean public opinion could shift in favor of the country acquiring nuclear weapons, coinciding with the potential emergence of a more conservative government in presidential elections later this year.

The second factor is that North Korea will find it harder to improve the quality of its existing capability and have fewer options as to how it uses nuclear weapons if the number of bombs it has is kept small and it is prevented from obtaining the material to build more.

In a 2005 paper on the military implications of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Bennett warned that there was a risk of North Korea using nuclear weapons not as a last resort but in the opening stages of a conflict and to target vital military installations if it acquired a sufficiently large arsenal.

"As the numbers of North Korean weapons grow, nuclear use becomes more likely, and that use will tend to start early in a campaign." Bennett said.

In such a scenario, North Korea might calculate that it could use a nuclear weapon against a military target without necessarily risking automatic nuclear retaliation because it would retain the potential for escalation by next hitting a major population center.

Bennett calculated that a 10-kiloton bomb dropped on a South Korean city could kill about 200,000 people. The Oct. 9 test was estimated to be only 1 kiloton, underscoring the importance of preventing North Korea from improving the yield of its weapons or developing an effective missile-delivery system.

Still, parties to the Beijing agreement could face considerable difficulties in trying to rein in the North's efforts to improve on the effectiveness of its nuclear capability, even while it closes its facilities for producing plutonium.

Although the agreement requires North Korea to declare all its nuclear programs, including the state of efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, there are doubts that it will engage in anything like full disclosure.

Kim Tae Woo, a nuclear policy specialist at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, said North Korea had been actively seeking to build a nuclear weapon based on highly enriched uranium for at least the past decade to complement its plutonium-based program.

"We believe that enrichment-related shipments from Pakistan to North Korea started in the mid or late 1990s," he said in a recent interview.

"Less than 10 years later, the question is, can the country make a uranium bomb with about a 10-year history of enrichment effort?" Kim added. "Maybe they are approaching that."

North Korea has denied claims by the United States and other governments that it obtained equipment to embark on a uranium-enrichment program.

Without full disclosure and dismantlement of all the North's civilian and weapons-related nuclear programs, Bermudez, the Janes analyst, said the Beijing deal would do little to calm worries about the security situation on the Korean Peninsula.

He warned that North Korea could easily try to circumvent efforts at denuclearizing the peninsula by carrying on secret research to enhance its capability.

"The physical design of a nuclear weapon can occur totally independently from the production of fissile material," he said.

"You can go ahead and keep refining your design, testing your design, imploding cores, getting better performance, refining your equations and your data set to produce a more reliable design," Bermudez added. "The only thing you won't be able to do is test it using fissile material."