Author Archives: J-Pollack

More About the Bosworth Appointment

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The Secretary of State “announced”:http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/02/119421.htm the appointment of “part-time North Korea envoy Stephen Bosworth”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1861/part-time-envoy on Friday.

Acting Deputy Department Spokesman Gordon Duguid had some “excellent adventures”:http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2009/02/119416.htm trying to explain what the job is.

Any other questions? Yes, please.

QUESTION: Secretary Clinton in Seoul announced that Steve Bosworth would be the new Special Representative to North Korea.

MR. DUGUID: Yes.

QUESTION: I’m wondering if you could explain a little bit the difference between Special Representative and Mr. Sung Kim’s position as Special Envoy to the Six-Party Talks.

MR. DUGUID: Okay. We did this a couple of weeks ago. A special envoy, in diplomatic parlance, has the authority to negotiate. A special representative, in this particular case, as well as in Ambassador Holbrooke’s case, is an authority who coordinates across the board for the United States. So Sung Kim will remain our Special Envoy and he will handle the day-to-day contact and discussions with our Six-Party colleagues. And Ambassador Bosworth will be the special representative coordinating the overall U.S. Government effort.

QUESTION: Will that be a full-time position or a part-time position?

MR. DUGUID: It will be a position that will take up a lot of his time. The question is leading to – will he be based in this building the entire time? Sorry. Of course, it’s a full-time position, but I mean, I don’t understand the question properly.

QUESTION: Okay. Yeah, he’s – it’s been reported that he’ll remain the dean of the Fletcher School?

MR. DUGUID: That is correct, he will.

QUESTION: Okay.

MR. DUGUID: Yes.

QUESTION: So it’s more like a part-time position?

MR. DUGUID: I won’t – I wouldn’t characterize it that way. He will be fully engaged in the – in the effort to try and denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. That is work enough for anyone, but he will also retain his current position.

QUESTION: So he will be based in this building?

MR. DUGUID: He will have an office here.

QUESTION: So it’s almost as if he were the U.S. ambassador to North Korea if U.S. had relation with North Korea?

MR. DUGUID: No, that’s not correct. The – Ambassador Bosworth will be our senior official handling North Korea issues and reporting to the Secretary of State as well as the President. The Secretary has asked Ambassador Bosworth to oversee U.S. efforts in the Six-Party Talks to achieve verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner. He will serve as our senior emissary for U.S. engagement with North Korea in close consultation with allies and partners. With regard to the Six-Party Talks, his involvement will facilitate high-level engagement with the North Koreans and other members of the Six-Party Talks. He will work closely with Sung Kim on this.

QUESTION: Will he travel to Pyongyang?

MR. DUGUID: I don’t have any plans – travel plans for him at the moment.

QUESTION: You seem to be suggesting that Bosworth will have a role and a dialogue with the North Koreans outside of the Six-Party.

MR. DUGUID: I am not. He is our senior–excuse me–Special Representative for the Six-Party Talks.

QUESTION: But he is going to be above the Special Envoy for the Six-Party Talks? Or who is going to decide? Who’s going to be the boss relative to —

MR. DUGUID: Secretary Clinton is the boss.

QUESTION: And so the two of them are equal?

MR. DUGUID: The two of them are working on the Six-Party Talks. Sung Kim does the day-to-day negotiating, and Ambassador Bosworth will work across the process in – for the U.S. Government. Therefore, Sung Kim is doing the State Department part on a day-to-day basis, and Ambassador Bosworth will work across the process coordinating all the U.S. Government efforts. They will work in close consultation.

QUESTION: How is Ambassador Bosworth’s job not a part-time job if he’s maintaining his other position? I mean, can you defend that in any way?

MR. DUGUID: I refer you to – well, I refer you to his – you know, Ambassador Bosworth himself on what he will be doing with his current position. He will not be leaving. But the work that he will do will fully engage his talents as we need them.

QUESTION: Right, but I mean, he’s not going to – if it’s not his only job, how is that not a diminished role than it was under the Bush Administration?

MR. DUGUID: The role that the Ambassador will play will be significant. He will lead our efforts and it will be – not be any diminution of the responsibilities that previous special representatives have had.

QUESTION: Not in terms of responsibilities, but in terms of effort.

MR. DUGUID: I think that he will engage 100 percent of his effort when the Secretary calls upon him to engage in these matters.

Yes. In the back, please.

QUESTION: Just wanted to clarify. Is Ambassador Bosworth – is he going to be attending head of delegation meetings when they have Six-Party meetings, or will that Sung Kim who will attend those meetings?

MR. DUGUID: I don’t think we’ve got that down for you yet. We’ll make the announcement of our delegation when we have those meetings, and it will be based on the conditions at the time.

You can “watch the video”:http://www.state.gov/video/?videoid=13775861001, too. The fun and games start at 1:54.

Just A Little Bit More Information

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So what’s the status of the fresh fuel stored at Yongbyon, and the “process lines”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1865/more-than-you-wanted-to-know-about-magnox to make more? For that, we have SIGINT.

From “Dr. Sigfried (Sig) Hecker’s account of a February 2008 visit”:http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2008_rpt/dprk.pdf:

They have in storage less than a quarter of a reactor load of clad fuel rods. They also have in storage a full load of bare uranium fuel rods (our best estimate is 12,000) for the 50 MWe reactor. It appears that these can be used for the 5 MWe reactor, but may require some machining, and would have to be clad with magnesium alloy cladding. These operations would require the reconstitution of parts of the fuel fabrication facility, including the machine shop. Such actions would most likely take close to 1 year.

[snip]

Fuel Fabrication Facility. The front end of fuel fabrication (Building 1) had been operating making uranium dioxide (UO2) from uranium ore concentrate right up to the time the facility was shut down on July 15, 2007. The back end was operational with seven conversion furnaces, two casting furnaces, and eight machining lathes. However, the middle part, the fluorination facility, had deteriorated so badly during the freeze (1994 to 2003) that the building has been abandoned (as we were shown in August 2007). However, the DPRK had recently completed alternate fluorination equipment (using dry rather than wet techniques) in one of the ancillary buildings. However, this was a makeshift operation that has limited throughput potential. It was not put into full operation by the time of the shutdown on July 15.

The disablement steps taken at the fuel fabrication facility focused on those buildings and equipment that were in reasonable working order. The removal of the three uranium dissolver tanks and the disassembly of the seven conversion furnaces (with thousands of refractory bricks) are serious disablement steps. The removal of the casting furnaces and the machining lathes also constitute significant steps. The DPRK has not been willing to take steps to render the fresh fuel in storage not usable for a reactor restart. These fuel rods could be bent, making it necessary to recast and remanufacture the rods to precise tolerances. Or, since the uranium metal content is substantial (close to 100 metric tons of natural uranium metal), the fresh fuel rods could be sold to one of the five parties, which could use the uranium as feed material for light-water reactor fuel. DPRK officials say that they await additional corresponding measures by the United States before they are willing to take actions on the fresh fuel rods. If the fresh fuel rods are bent, the DPRK would have to recast and remachine, which would add several months to a restart time. If the fresh fuel were sold, then the DPRK would have to restart the entire fuel fabrication facility and produce new uranium metal, which would add approximately a year to a restart time.

There are some “pictures”:http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/5220/gallery/, too.

It’s been reported that “Hecker and colleagues may visit Yongbyon again soon”:http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20090209_4835.php.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot about the “musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmwlzwGMMwc. Silly me.

More Than You Wanted To Know About Magnox

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Paul “raises a really important point”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1863/north-korea-heuwhat-about-the-uf6 about North Korea’s uranium conversion capabilities. It’s a timely subject, too.

The fuel fabrication complex at Yongbyon is reported to involve a series of process lines for uranium conversion. Uranium ore concentrate (i.e., yellowcake) is converted to UO3, which is converted to UO2, which is converted to green salt (UF4), which is then converted to metal to produce Magnox fuel rods. (“Have a look”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2179/nork-fuel-rod.)

The metallic fuel is natural (unenriched) uranium, which is cast into cylindrical shapes, machined smooth, and placed inside “cans” made of a magnesium alloy. “Here’s how the last conversion step is done in the UK”:http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/Products_&_Services/docs/flysheets/NF-FE-0010.pdf:

Uranium tetrafluoride (UF4) is converted to uranium metal for Magnox fuel by mixing it with magnesium metal. When heated in a furnace to 600oC, the UF4 and magnesium react together. Uranium melts and flows into a catchpot at the bottom of the furnace and a layer of fluoride slag forms on the top. After cooling, the billet of uranium is separated from the slag, remelted, and cast into rods.

And that’s why Yongbyon doesn’t have a UF6 process line (that anyone knows about). Now you know.

Now, as far as anyone knows, the only place this process has taken place in recent years, besides Yongbyon, is the “Springfields”:http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/Businesses/nuclear_fuel/springfields_site.shtm facility in Preston, Lancashire, England.

This is a timely subject because the IAEA’s latest report on Syria, “GOV/2009/6”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/159/Syria.pdf, mainly concerns the uranium traces found at the suspect site in the wadi at al-Kibar (AKA Dair Alzour), which appears for all the world to have been a Yongbyon-style Magnox reactor. It says that

analysis of the environmental samples taken from the Dair Alzour site revealed a significant number of anthropogenic natural uranium particles (i.e. produced as a result of chemical processing)…

Now, perhaps these particles weren’t traces of Magnox fuel or one of the related compounds mentioned above. But if they were from Magnox fuel, there are only three possible sources I can think of:

Now consider the following excerpt from the IAEA’s Syria report of November 2008, “GOV/2008/60”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/142/gov2008-60.pdf:

14. Satellite imagery and other information available to the Agency concerning installations at the three other locations in Syria referred to above suggest that those locations may be of relevance to the activities at the Dair Alzour site. As indicated above, the Agency requested access to the three locations on 2 May 2008. Analysis of satellite imagery taken of these locations indicates that landscaping activities and the removal of large containers took place shortly after the Agency’s request for access. While these activities may be unrelated to the Dair Alzour site, it would be helpful if Syria were to provide an explanation for these activities and to permit the Agency to visit the three locations.

Unfortunately, these three locations are mentioned only glancingly in GOV/2009/6. It doesn’t sound as if access has been granted, or will be anytime soon. And as for those “large containers,” what was in them and where they went is anybody’s guess.

Congratulations. You made it to the “musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K18p1tDHtxI&feature=related.

NK HEU Plant?

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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.

Part-Time Envoy?

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From tonight’s _Nelson Report_:

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.

“Musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll6LLGePYwM.

IAEA Iran Report Preview

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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.

Courtship Rituals of French SSBNs

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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.

Stuff Happens

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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.