Devising a new one. Suggestions are welcome.
*Update:*
I can’t blog about arms control, so some meta-thinking is, unfortunately, in order. We rarely get meta around here, but that’s what it’s come to.
Blog Future
5 Replies
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Time Out
No blogging for a week or so.
Hoodbhoy on Pakistan’s Future
The well-known Pakistani physicist and social activist Pervez Hoodbhoy has a “five-year forecast”:http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/whither-pakistan-five-year-forecast for his country:
bq. As for the future: Tribal insurgents cannot overrun Islamabad and Pakistan’s main cities, which are protected by thousands of heavily armed military and paramilitary troops. Rogue elements within the military and intelligence agencies have instigated or organized suicide attacks against their own colleagues. Now, dazed by the brutality of these attacks, the officer corps finally appears to be moving away from its earlier sympathy and support for extremism. This makes a seizure of the nuclear arsenal improbable. But Pakistan’s “urban Taliban,” rather than illiterate tribal fighters, pose a nuclear risk. There are indeed more than a few scientists and engineers in the nuclear establishment with extreme religious views.
Read “the whole thing”:http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/whither-pakistan-five-year-forecast.
Il Piccolo Principe
“Antoine de Saint Exupéry”:http://books.google.com/books?id=CQYg20lTHtMC, meet “Niccolò Machiavelli”:http://books.google.com/books?id=bJUBAAAAQAAJ.
Word has been leaking out of South Korea for awhile now that KJI’s presumed successor is his third son, Kim Jong Un, aged 26. The Swiss magazine _L’Hebdo_ carries an account (en français) of the “apprentice dictator’s” “schooling in Berne”:http://www.hebdo.ch/Exclusif_Coree_Nord_dictateur_Suisse_1461_.html. The _Washington Post_ hits “some of the high points”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060103750.html:
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bq. Kim attended the school under the false name of Pak Chol, the weekly said, and school officials and his classmates “thought they were dealing with the son of the driver of the embassy.” Friends and staff at the school remembered a shy boy who enjoyed skiing, loved the National Basketball Association and spoke highly of action-movie actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. He reportedly left the school at age 15 to return to North Korea, and little about his life there is known to the outside world.
Bill Powell of _Time_ has a “profile with details from his Pyongyang days”:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1901758,00.html:
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bq.. In his memoir recounting the days he spent as Kim Jong Il’s personal chef in Pyongyang, Kenji Fujimoto calls Kim Jong Un, the third son of the North Korea dictator, the “Prince.” “When Jong Un shook hands with me,” Fujimoto writes, “he stared at me with a vicious look. I cannot forget the look in the Prince’s eyes: it’s as if he was thinking, ‘This guy is a despicable Japanese.'” Jong Un, Fujimoto also writes, is “a chip off the old block, a spitting image of his father in terms of face, body shape and personality.”
[snip]
Jong Un, Fujimoto writes, is different. He and his brother Jong Chul enjoyed playing basketball — but after the games, Jong Chul would just say goodbye to their friends and leave. Jong Un would then gather up his teammates and, like a coach, analyze the game they just played: “You should have passed the ball to this guy, you should have shot it then.” According to various, usually unsourced South Korean press reports since Fujimoto’s book came out, Jong Un is said to be “ambitious” and a “take-no-prisoners” type — again, in contrast to his older brothers.
p. Notice what connects these accounts: basketball. Soon, perhaps, KCNA will start accusing the brigandish puppet flunkeys of conducting a madcap full-court press.
Meanwhile, it appears that North Korea is “preparing a long-range missile”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-north-korea-missile2-2009jun02,0,4799191.story at its new launch facility at Dongchang-ni.
What KJI Is After
Not the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, to judge by “this item”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200905/news30/20090530-07ee.html:
bq.. Pyongyang, May 30 (KCNA) — Meetings took place in the capitals of South Phyongan, Jagang, South Hwanghae, North Hwanghae and Kangwon Provinces to hail the second successful nuclear test.
[snip]
Speakers at the meetings said that the above-said success marked a historic event which demonstrated the dignity and might of Songun [military-first] Korea to the world once again.
[snip]
The speakers underscored the need to adorn every day of the 150-day campaign with miracles and feats, highly proud and honored with the status of the country as a nuclear weapons state and open the gate to a thriving nation in 2012, the centenary of birth of President Kim Il Sung.
p. This is a mite ironic at a couple levels. The part about a “thriving nation,” for example. Also, Kim Il Sung’s dying wish was said to have been the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
The Disappointing New York Times
Have you ever written to the _New York Times_ to ask for a “correction”:http://www.nytimes.com/ref/pageoneplus/corrections.html? They do run them. Here’s an “example”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/business/31corrections-001.html:
bq. An article last Sunday about residential golf resorts opened by a developer transposed his given and middle names. He is Edward Robert Ginn III.
Mr. Ginn is probably relieved to see that. But I’m left wondering why this request of May 23 has not been deemed worthy of a response:
bq.. To whom it may concern,
I would like to request correction of a passage in the May 20 story by David Sanger and Nazila Fathi, “Iran Test-Fires Missile With 1,200-Mile Range.”
The second half of the article includes a claim that “enriching uranium to weapons grade” is “now under way at the large nuclear complex at Natanz.” To the best of my knowledge, this is not accurate; it has been ruled out by every report of the International Atomic Energy Agency that has reached the public eye since enrichment operations commenced at Natanz in 2007.
The authors presumably meant to write that the nuclear complex at Natanz is _capable_ of enriching uranium to weapons grade. This is a very important distinction, as the actual decision to start enriching uranium to weapons grade would be similar in moment to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
I hope you will clarify this matter for the readers.
Yours,
Josh Pollack
[contact info omitted]
(NYT subscriber since 1996)
p. I have no idea why that doesn’t merit so much as an acknowledgment.
For reference, here’s the link to the “Sanger-Fathi article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/middleeast/21iran.html. Here’s “what I wrote about it earlier”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2018/art-of-the-blown-headline. Click and scroll down a bit.
Two Ways of Looking at a Plutonium Stockpile
According to Elaine Grossman’s “Pentagon source”:http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20090529_3404.php, North Korea’s plutonium is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma:
“We don’t know how much (fissile) material that they have,” the Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified, said in a Wednesday interview. “We don’t know how much of what they have they want to expend on tests.”
However, multiple nuclear tests are “quite possible,” the official told Global Security Newswire.
As the title of this post suggests, I can see at least a couple of ways of looking at this matter. As per usual, they are based on no special information of any kind — no rumors, gossip, or leaks — just my own speculations and educated guesses. Let’s call them “More is More” and “Less is More.”
More is More
According to the Theory of More is More, North Korea is a plutonium miser who carefully husbands its stockpile. Nothing followed the 2006 test for so long because every last little bit was needed to deter invasion, command respect, or whatever it is exactly that one supposes North Korea’s plutonium is for. Because Test #1 was a fizzle, further testing was in demand, but it would have to wait for further reprocessing of plutonium.
That’s basically what Sig Hecker was telling Mark Landler of the NYT “back in mid-April”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1996/north-koreas-reprocessing-option:
But Dr. Hecker said the North Koreans could begin reprocessing plutonium from an existing cache in a couple of weeks. That would allow them to make at least one additional bomb, he said, which might embolden them to conduct another test and refine their bomb-making expertise.
“With Yongbyon disabled, it meant no more bombs and no better bombs,” Dr. Hecker said.
In sum: Fewer tests, more plutonium, more value.
Less is More
According to the Theory of Less is More, because Test #1 was a fizzle, North Korea basically had nothing of value at all. So the more testing done, the closer the DPRK gets to its Holy Grail, the weaponized device. (In inimitable NK lingo, this would be called “bolstering the war deterrent.”) Nothing followed the 2006 test for so long either to avoid disrupting the 6PT process, because a suitable provocation had yet to be found, or because that’s how long it took the scientists and engineers to be ready for another go-round.
In sum: More tests, less plutonium, more value.
(Somewhere out there, there’s also got to be a Theory of It Doesn’t Matter, in which the timing of nuclear tests plays a crucial political function, and the rest is an afterthought. But I’m not ready to go there.)
…Drum Roll…
Now, since North Korea _has_ tested before reprocessing the spent fuel on hand, More is More is looking a little shaky. Sig Hecker has lately written a “valuable essay”:http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/26/from_pyongyang_to_tehran on this and related topics. It’s interesting to see how he handles the problem:
Although Yongbyon will not be able to complete reprocessing for four to six months, the anticipated increase in plutonium is what has allowed it to conduct this week’s nuclear test. …This test will enhance Pyongyang’s confidence in its arsenal and may be an important step toward miniaturizing warheads to fit on its missiles. Still, the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal will remain restricted by its limited plutonium inventory. Fully capable nuclear-tipped missiles will require further tests, so the sequence of this week’s provocative steps foreshadows more of the same.
Here one detects some wavering in the direction of Less is More from a carefully modified More is More, in which the _anticipation_ of reprocessing enabled Test #2. I’m probably not doing justice to the essay, so read “the whole thing”:http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/26/from_pyongyang_to_tehran for yourself. But basically, one no longer sees the strongly held judgment of April 2009.
An aside: for reasons not worth regurgitating here, no one outside the DPRK itself knows more about North Korea’s plutonium than Hecker. His views are carefully attended to in the norkological community and beyond, making him an opinion leader of some heft. It is safe to take what he says as indicative of much more than one person’s judgment. At least, “that’s what I do”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2023/surprise-intel-failure.
The Envelope, Please
So, “what should we expect”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2021/what-to-expect-from-north-korea?
At this point, we seem to be looking at a rolling pattern of military activity that will continue for some time, as the DPRK takes “additional self-defensive measures in order to defend its supreme interests” and “reacts to additional perceived provocations”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2319/lick-the-carrot. Who knows? Perhaps the _Sturm und Drang_ will drag on through the end of the “150-Day Battle”:http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&num=4876, on October 10. We’ve seen a nuclear test and several short-range missile tests. Now there are “indications of an upcoming ICBM test”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053000478.html.
And how many more nuclear tests, if any, should we expect? To answer that question, it would be helpful to know how many test shafts have been spotted up at “P’unggye-yok”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/kilju-punggye-yok.htm. Sean O’Connor has “spotted two possibles”:http://geimint.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuclear-korea.html in 2005 imagery. Maybe someone could task a commercial imagery satellite to see what it can see?
The short answer is, I guess we’ll find out.
Here are some resources for anyone getting up to speed on NK Pu. ISIS published a “detailed report”:http://www.isis-online.org/publications/dprk/DPRKplutoniumFEB.pdf in 2007. The Washington Post provided some insight into the thinking of the U.S. intelligence community back in “May 2008”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/13/AR2008051303205.html. A key point in the article was “clarified at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1886/a-lot-of-nork-pu#comment. There were also several other articles on North Korea’s formal declaration of its stockpile, “linked and discussed at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1907/north-korean-reprocessing-campaigns.