Just to add to Josh’s “post”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1862/nk-heu-plant, I have been wondering if any better evidence has come to light that North Korea is capable of producing UF6. I haven’t been following North Korea as closely as I used to, but I “once wrote”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_03/NA_NorthKorea that:
North Korea has indigenous supplies of natural uranium, but *whether it can produce uranium hexafluoride is unclear.* A former State Department official familiar with North Korea’s nuclear programs told Arms Control Today Feb. 22 that, as of October 2002, *there was no evidence that North Korea possessed a facility for producing uranium hexafluoride.* North Korea does have a facility for producing uranium tetrafluoride, a uranium compound that is then converted to uranium hexafluoride, that was frozen under the Agreed Framework, the official said.
However, Gary Samore, who headed nonproliferation efforts for the White House during the Clinton administration, said *North Korea could “probably start making hex [uranium hexafluoride] fairly quickly,” Nuclear Fuel reported in September 2003.*
I wish people would focus on uranium conversion more when they talk about uranium enrichment. Without feedstock, a centrifuge facility can’t enrich a damn thing.
According to the South Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo, North Korea has a secret underground uranium enrichment facility, right there at the Yongbyon nuclear complex. The heavily scrutinized Yongbyon nuclear complex. The story is summarized “here”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iUMkh8pqycilFWddJSqYHe0psvcg.
Seriously, Yongbyon? Why not just put it under the National Mall?
This is actually just the latest in a series of reports to this effect. “The location moves around quite a bit, but the theme is consistent”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1418/size-matters.
And let’s not forget “Kumchang-ri”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/598/david-sanger-two-time-loser-on-kilju-and-kumchang-ri.
The other night we reported, correctly, that Tufts Fletcher School dean Steve Bosworth will be the Special Envoy for N. Korea, but we need to amend, or extend that information with the following:
Bosworth will be working part-time, not full-time, and he’ll continue his job as dean. When we wrote “confirmed” we meant to imply that, after Gen. Zinni, it’s trust but verify. This job will NOT be “Senate” confirmed.
Sung Kim, A/S Chris Hill’s special envoy for the 6-party talks, will be the primary negotiator , but on those occasions when high-level negotiations are needed, Bosworth will be called-in as the Special Envoy.
We would be less than candid if we did not also report that while the Korea commentariat thinks the world of Bosworth, there is concern that his post NOT being Senate confirmed makes it questionable he would have the top-level access required to achieve real decisions with N. Korea.
Go figure.
Bosworth’s profile is “here”:http://fletcher.tufts.edu/faculty/bosworth/profile.asp.
A previous mention of the envoy rumors is “here”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1844/track-i-and-a-half-in-pyongyang.
IAEA DG Mohamed ElBaradei made some public remarks. It’s a mixed picture.
Update: see “the actual report”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/158/Iran.pdf.
Highlights from “Reuters”:http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE51G5JL20090217:
“They haven’t really been adding centrifuges, which is a good thing,” ElBaradei said at a think-tank in Paris, adding: “Our assessment is that it’s a political decision.”
[snip]
“Natanz is supposed to have 50,000 centrifuges. Right now they have 5,000,” he said, adding that Iran had not added a “significant” number of centrifuges.
[snip]
“No, I’m not obviously happy with the degree of cooperation … They shut off any cooperation with the agency over the past few months,” said ElBaradei, who has for years called on Iran to do more to help his agency’s investigations.
“Iran right now is not providing any access or any clarification with regard to those studies or the whole possible military dimension,” he added.
ElBaradei played down fears of an imminent Iranian bomb.
“They will have probably in a year or so enough low enriched uranium which, if converted to highly enriched uranium, and if they have the know-how to weaponise it and to deliver it, then they can have one nuclear weapon,” he said.
But many other steps would have to be taken to produce a weapon, such as walking out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelling U.N. nuclear inspectors and mastering the technology to produce a nuclear explosion, he said.
“If I go by the intelligence community in the U.S., they are saying that they still have 2-5 years to be able to do that — to develop a weapon — which to me means that we have at least enough time for diplomacy,” he said.
Related: ElBaradei’s last term is winding down. The AP’s George Jahn “profiles”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jiRSE2djCKxpy0LYT6SaecqOfCyQD96E21DO0 the two leading candidates for IAEA Director-General.
Various accounts have described the damage to Le Triomphant as the result of a low-speed collision — a glancing blow — that nevertheless crushed the French submarine’s sonar dome, which goes on the nose of the boat. By contrast, scrapes and dents on HMS Vanguard were allegedly visible to observers (meaning they were somewhere on its top half) as it proceeded homeward up the Firth of Clyde. It follows that the French boat was trying to nuzzle its British cousin.
[Update: Judging by “this video”:http://banthebomb.org/ne/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1022&Itemid=1, there was no visible damage to the top half of the Vanguard.]
But really, I’m not here to talk to you about the private lives of mechanical whales of mass destruction. “Old news”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1858/stuff-happens already. What’s of more interest is how the two organizations have reacted.
First, a bit of background. According to Stephen Saunders, a retired senior officer of the Royal Navy, the longstanding absence of France from the NATO military command structure raises questions about whether the French Navy participates in the alliance’s “waterspace management”:http://www.janes.com/media/releases/pc090217_1.shtml arrangements.
Judging by “the comments of French Defense Minister Herve Morin”:http://www.welt.de/english-news/article3220555/French-and-UK-may-coordinate-submarine-patrols.html to the French radio station Canal Plus, it doesn’t, but would like to:
“There’s no story to this — the British aren’t hunting French submarines, and the French submarines don’t hunt British submarines,” Morin told Canal+ radio.
“We face an extremely simple technological problem, which is that these submarines are not detectable. They make less noise than a shrimp.”
He said the submarines’ mission was to sit at the bottom of the sea and act as a nuclear deterrent.
“Between France and Britain, there are things we can do together….one of the solutions would be to think about the patrol zones,” Morin said.
As it was undersea, so it is on land: the French taking initiative, the British displaying reticence. UK officials seem to have little to say about the matter. In fact, the only statements I can find online are couched grudgingly, as “reactions to”:http://www.blogs.mod.uk/ “tabloid newspaper articles”:http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/Royal-Navy-News-HMS-Vanguard.html?&changeNav=6568.
The French are almost chatty by comparison. Not only did they publicize the collision “before they even knew what it involved”:http://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/base/breves/incident_sous_marin (“probablement un conteneur” — can’t you hear the Gallic shrug?), but they declared the “collision entre sous-marins”:http://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/base/breves/collision_entre_sous_marins without fuss, and even threw in an “official communiqué”:http://www.defense.gouv.fr/defense/votre_espace/journalistes/communiques/communiques_du_ministere_de_la_defense/communique_du_ministere_de_la_defense_du_16_02_09. And then there’s M. Morin’s modest proposal.
In fairness, I should mention that just last month, three retired senior UK military men called for “scrapping the nuclear deterrent outright”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5525682.ece. Reticent, that is not. But their stand does not seem to be winning the day.
A final note: the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reports an “uptick in Russian SSBN patrols during 2008”:http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2009/02/russia.php. All that’s cold is warm again. Or the other way around.
And with that, what you were waiting for: the “musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2LQGigK-0.
Much remains to be explained about the remarkable encounter between two nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic in early February. The whole affair really puts the Foxtrot* in “WTF”:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whiskey_tango_foxtrot.
One angle probably not worth fixating on is the idea, mooted in the “comments at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2188/when-ssbns-collide, that this was no coincidence. There’s just no plausible reason to operate SSBNs intentionally in proximity to one another.
But meant another way, perhaps it was no coincidence. It’s easy to “underestimate”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1849/whats-the-chance “probabilities”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1855/whats-the-chance-ctd for at least a couple of reasons.
First, the “role of iteration”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1849/whats-the-chance. If the chance of a bad event per patrol is one umpteenth, the chance of a bad event per umpty-ump patrols may be a good bit higher. (It’s the complement of the chance-of-no-bad-event-per-single-instance raised to the power of the number of instances.) We tend to overlook this.
The implications of this point for the chance of general nuclear war are left as an exercise for the reader. Happy spreadsheeting, and sleep well.
Second, the “assumption of independence”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1855/whats-the-chance-ctd. It’s simplicity itself to do calculations such as the one above, but it assumes that each instance is not influenced by any other instance. They’re all mutually independent. But whether it’s satellites or sous-marins, there routinely seem to be reasons — physical, technical, geographic, etc. — to operate in similar or overlapping patterns. In short, there are dependencies between events. This, too, is easy to overlook. Among other things, it makes the math a great deal harder.
The implications of this point for credit default swaps are left as an exercise for the reader should be lost on no one by now.
All of which is a way of saying that the “shut-mouthedness of the French and British navies”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/world/europe/17submarine.html about this event is no indication of anything more sinister than the wholly reasonable desire to preserve secrecy about their SSBN patrol areas. Based on what’s been published so far, you can already make some educated guesses about the general vicinity of this event, which ought to be enough to make anybody a little uneasy.
It helps to recall why the boat goes under the water in the first place: so you can’t see where it goes.
*Yes, I realize that neither of these boats has much in common with a “Foxtrot”:http://www.russiansublongbeach.com/Scorpionfacts.html except that they all go under the water.
Yes, it’s the “theme”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1847/iridium-cosmos of the “week”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1849/whats-the-chance.
According to the “BBC’s defense correspondent”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7892294.stm, the undersea collision of HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant was not too likely:
“This is clearly a one-in-a-million chance when you think about how big the Atlantic is,” she said.
Now, clearly that’s a figure of speech rather than a considered estimate. And perhaps it’s one of those probabilities that’s altogether too easy to lowball. As a source explains later in the same item, submarines like to hang around and spend time together:
Nuclear engineer John Large told the BBC that navies often used the same “nesting grounds”.
“Both navies want quiet areas, deep areas, roughly the same distance from their home ports. So you find these station grounds have got quite a few submarines, not only French and Royal Navy but also from Russia and the United States.”
Par-tay.
Here it is, your “musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUG2SQK03tU.
The Secretary of State has something to say about fissile material in North Korea, but the transcript is not yet online. [Update: here’s the “transcript”:http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/02/117345.htm.] From “Glenn Kessler”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/15/AR2009021501790.html:
“There is a debate within the intelligence community as to exactly the extent of the highly enriched uranium program,” Clinton told reporters traveling with her to Asia on her first voyage as the chief U.S. diplomat.
[snip]
“The Agreed Framework was torn up on the basis of the concerns about the highly enriched uranium program,” Clinton said. “There is no debate that, once the Agreed Framework was torn up, the North Koreans began to reprocess plutonium with a vengeance because all bets were off. The result is they now have nuclear weapons, which they did not have before.”
[snip]
“My goal is the denuclearization of North Korea,” Clinton said. “That means a verifiably complete accounting of whatever programs they have and the removal of the reprocessed plutonium that they were able to achieve because they were given the opportunity to do so.”
“When they move forward” on ending the program, she added, “we have a great openness to working with them,” including “a willingness to help the people of North Korea.”
Perhaps Secretary Clinton meant to say that the North Koreans have more nuclear weapons than before the Agreed Framework was torn up. (If memory serves — this was back in late 2002 — the North Koreans were the first to declare the AF dead, but remained within the NPT and kept Yongbyon on ice until the U.S. cut off HFO deliveries.) But perhaps she meant exactly what she said.
Jeff has already “laid out the issue”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1907/north-korean-reprocessing-campaigns, so it needn’t be explained all over again here.
Speaking of primary sources, here’s the “Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community”:http://www.dni.gov/testimonies/20090212_testimony.pdf (PDF). It’s already gotten a great deal of attention for A) emphasizing the threat posed by the _global_ — i.e., not just national — economic crisis, and B) stating that al-Qaida in Pakistan has suffered “a succession of blows as damaging to the group as any since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001” at the, um, hands of “America’s flying killer robots”:http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/predator/. (The “UK’s, too”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/04/raf_reaper_reaps_at_last/.) But all that’s been covered elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to how the assessment deals with North Korea.
Right after the major sections on the global economic crisis and “turning the corner” on al-Qaida are some words about “the Arc of Instability.” This seems to be the successor to such colorful geo-political constructs as the “Axis of Evil”:http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html and the “Shi’ite Crescent”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,518131,00.html. Basically, it’s the Middle East plus Pakistan and Afghanistan. Notice which perennial trouble spot is missing!
This is followed by “Rising Asia.” The “rising” part means China and India, but eventually — starting on page 24 in a 45-page document — we do reach a sub-section on North Korea and its nuclear program:
…Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions and proliferation behavior threaten to destabilize East Asia. The North’s October 2006 nuclear test is consistent with our longstanding assessment that it had produced a nuclear device. Prior to the test, we assessed that North Korea produced enough plutonium for at least a half dozen nuclear weapons. The IC continues to assess North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability in the past. Some in the Intelligence Community have increasing concerns that North Korea has an ongoing covert uranium enrichment program.
And it goes on for a bit from there. But what leaps out (especially with the added emphasis) is the divided and equivocal statement on uranium enrichment.
Update: I forgot to mention it, but this is not entirely new news. For background, see “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2153/nork-heu-3-12-years-old, “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2156/more-on-nork-heu, and “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2163/yet-more-on-nork-heu.
