Author Archives: J-Pollack

There They Go Again

3 Replies

Should the _New York Times_ op-ed page introduce fact-checking? Given recent trends, it really couldn’t hurt.

A couple days ago, the _Times_ ran an “op-ed by John Bolton”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26bolton.html. For reasons known only to the author, he chose to revive a “canard about Obama strong-arming Israel into the NPT before it is ready to join”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2285/oh-calm-down.

I mention this only because it’s in my pet rock collection. It was just one of a series of “questionable representations” “catalogued and dissected at the PONI blog”:http://forums.csis.org/poni/?p=140 earlier today. Among other things, PONI locates “an Israeli account”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1086837.html of the substance of the Obama-Netanyahu exchange on nuclear opacity. I’ll quote it in full:

On another issue, Obama told Netanyahu at their meeting on Monday that Washington has no plans to change its policy on Israel’s nuclear program, according to an Israeli source.

“At the talks, Obama expressed his deep commitment to Israel’s security and his full adherence to the deep presidential understandings in this area,” the source said.

In 1969, the United States and Israel reached an understanding under which Israel would maintain ambiguity about its nuclear program and would refrain from conducting a nuclear weapons test. In exchange, the U.S. would refrain from pressing Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would require Israel to give up any military nuclear capabilities it had and place the reactor in Dimona under international supervision. These understandings, which have remained in force to this day, form the basis of Israel’s nuclear policy.

In recent weeks, Israeli commentators have expressed fear that the U.S. was planning to change this policy, after a mid-level State Department official publicly declared that Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea should all join the NPT. But this comment was actually mere routine, reflecting America’s commitment in principle to eventual worldwide nuclear disarmament, and was not aimed specifically at Israel.

During his previous term as prime minister, Netanyahu requested and obtained a written commitment from then-president Clinton that the U.S. would preserve Israel’s strategic deterrence capability – a euphemism for nuclear capability – and make sure that its arms control initiatives did not impair this capability. Netanyahu also told Clinton that Israel would not join an American initiative to draft a new treaty that would ban the production of plutonium.

The above account appeared in _Ha’aretz_ five days before Bolton’s op-ed went to print.

PONI observes that op-eds, because of their brevity,

bq. can be frustrating because they do not have to cite or explain their interpretation of facts. Maybe they should.

Roger that. Writers should at least have to justify themselves to an editor. Fact-checking is bad enough on the news side of the house. On the op-ed side, it’s nonexistent.

Another Example

Two days before the Bolton piece, the _Times_ ran an item by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann claiming in part that

bq. the Obama administration has done nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized program, begun in President George W. Bush’s second term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

This appears to refer to _overt_ “programs to support”:http://statelists.state.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0611a&L=dospress&P=612 “democracy in Iran”:http://statelists.state.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0706a&L=dospress&P=552, whose usefulness has “come into question”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/10/AR2007101002441.html. (Human rights and democracy, as “previously noted around here”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1917/libyas-theory-of-the-hard-cases, look pretty threatening to some governments.) But these total well short of “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

If Leverett and Mann are referring to some other “well-publicized” program, it has eluded me completely. But maybe I’m not reading the _Times_ attentively enough.

Then, there is the small matter of how to “cancel or repudiate” a covert program in such a way that anyone would know about it.

So what has the Administration done with the Iran democracy programs that people besides Leverett and Mann actually know about? Mostly, they were funded by a supplemental, and never budgeted. It doesn’t appear that all the money was actually obligated (i.e., spent down). So are Leverett and Mann calling for a rescission (i.e., withdrawal of the unspent funds)? It’s not clear.

Perhaps they are expressing concern about the new and amusingly titled “Near East Regional Democracy”:http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/2009_Con_Statement_DivH.pdf program. Yes, NERD! Right now, it looks like $25 million, to be awarded “on a competitive basis.” Some of that could conceivably go to NGOs in Iran, if they choose to apply. But there is no assurance that they ever will.

Op-ed fact checking: an idea whose time has come.

What To Expect From North Korea

1 Reply

A good place to start might be the “Foreign Ministry statement of April 29”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200904/news29/20090429-14ee.html:

In case the UNSC does not make an immediate apology [for the presidential statement condemning the launch of the Unha-2], such actions will be taken as:

Firstly, the DPRK will be compelled to take additional self-defensive measures in order to defend its supreme interests.

The measures will include *nuclear tests* and *test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.*

Secondly, the DPRK will make a decision to build a light water reactor power plant and start the *technological development for ensuring self-production of nuclear fuel* as its first process without delay.

Emphasis added.

We are now at one nuclear test and counting.

-(Why)- Did It Come as a Surprise?

In light of the foregoing statement, today’s test cannot have come as a surprise to anyone. But “people who follow this subject intently”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2020/lankov-times-the-market were taken aback by how soon it happened. One would assume that the preparations were in motion even before April 29, yet we saw nothing in the papers about it. That’s awfully interesting, since the last time a nuclear test was announced to the world as a _fait accompli_ — I’m relying on memory here, so please correct me if I’m wrong — was the first of India’s two rounds of testing in 1998, widely considered in the United States to have been an intelligence failure.

There are two possibilities. Either A) the Obama Administration saw some advantage to keeping mum, and turns out to be awfully good at keeping mum, or B) someone missed something they should not have missed. If it’s the latter, the results may be no more than mildly embarrassing, but it’s still a little disconcerting.

Update: Chosun Ilbo “reports”:http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/05/26/2009052600715.html that the U.S. and South Korea were keeping a weather eye on the test site. But it’s not clear that they had good indications on timing.

Further update: Thanks to the contributions of readers “here”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2020/lankov-times-the-market#comment and “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2313/what-to-expect-from-north-korea#comment, it’s clear that Option A, above, is the correct answer. There were a few leaks, but nothing that the community of wonks picked up on the time. Perhaps Option B applies to us. We’ll have to do better, next time.

I had not seen it widely discussed, but would venture that the tacit consensus, “expressed earlier by Sig Hecker”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1996/north-koreas-reprocessing-option, was that North Korea was unlikely to test again before completing a reprocessing campaign. Perhaps not, after all.

Now might be a good time to revisit what North Korea is doing on ICBMs and the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle.

“Cross-posted to ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2313/what-to-expect-from-north-korea. See the “comments at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2313/what-to-expect-from-north-korea#comment.

Timing The Market

2 Replies

The _Post_ quotes Andrei Lankov on the timing of “North Korea’s second nuclear test”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052500297_pf.html:

bq. “This is absolutely predictable, even though I thought they would do it later, allowing some time for tension to mount,” said Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based expert on North Korea who teaches at Kookmin University. “This is part of their usual blackmail tactics, aimed at squeezing more concessions from the United States.”

As Lankov says, that North would take the present opportunity to test a nuclear device is not surprising. They’ve told us as much. That the test comes so soon after the diplomatic breakdown, this time around, is perhaps a bit different, but maybe not so much. Consider: the last time we went through this drill, back in 2006, there was an early-July-to-early-October gap between the (not so) big missile launch and the (not so) big bang underground. This time, we’ve only had to wait from early April to late May. It’s a bit more than a month’s difference, then, if one measures from weapons test to weapons test, rather than from the announcement blowing off the 6PT to the first weapons test.

Anyway, the real surprise is, there were no media leaks about activity at the test site. If there were any, I missed them.

Update: Andrei Lankov is probably the top Anglophone expert on North Korea. I’m not trying to pick on him, or anyone in particular, really. Everyone expected a North Korean nuclear test this year; nobody expected it today.

Further update: If it seems that I’ve underplayed my intended point here, it’s because I’m reluctant to cast aspersions on the hard work of the intelligence community, especially with an argument from silence. Not everything that gets noticed necessarily gets leaked out. But it does seem odd that we heard nothing in the days before the test. The Administration had no interest in appearing to be caught off-guard.

I’ve tweaked the title of this blog entry and the first paragraph, so as not to distract from the intended point.

On A Related Note

Some believe that North Korea’s July 5, 2006 missile tests were timed to the 4th of July holiday here in the U.S. This “some” has never included yours truly: if that was the name of the game, why wait until late in the day of the 4th in the U.S.? Why not seize the morning headlines? To me, it always seemed more interesting that the fireworks display, including the failed TD-2 test, started right after a space shuttle launch. But seeing as it’s Memorial Day today, perhaps there _was_ something to that line of thinking after all. Or perhaps the North Koreans noticed the extra goose they got out of us, and did purposefully today what they did incidentally then.

Here We Go Again?

1 Reply

-It’s too early to say. But at first glance,- it’s already starting to look like Russia vs. the rest on the yield of “North Korea’s second nuclear test”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/world/asia/26nuke.html:

Kim Sung-han, a security expert at Korea University in Seoul, estimated the test had a power of one kiloton of explosives, slightly more than the 0.8 kiloton detonation reported in 2006. If correct, that would be a fraction of the size of the blasts from American bombs that destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 — themselves considered small by current standards.

But Alexander Drobyshevsky, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, told RIA-Novosti news agency offered a different estimate, saying that the force of the blast was 10 to 20 kilotons.

We’ve “been here before”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1971/russia-eyes-north-korea. Why?

Update: “Martin Kalinowski”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/file_download/22/Kalinowski.pdf of Universität Hamburg has a higher estimate than does Kim Sung-han, but he’s still well south of the numbers given by the Russian Ministry of Defense:

bq. Several seismic observatories all over the world recorded an event that took place in the North East of the country. The U.S. Geological Survey determined the event time as 00:54:43 UTC. The location is close to the first nuclear test. The seismic body wave magnitude of 4.7 is larger as compared to the value of 4.1±0.1 in 2006. According to the assessment of Martin Kalinowski, this corresponds to an explosive yield of about 3 to 8 kilotons TNT equivalent with a most likely yield of 4 kt TNT. In 2006 the yield was unexpectedly low with an estimate of 0.5 to 0.8 kt TNT.

I’ll add more as it pops up, time permitting.

Later update: As usual, all the action is at ACW. Jeff has located “three estimates”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2310/north-korean-nuclear-test-mb via the “International Seismological Centre’s Online Bulletin”:http://snipr.com/iqcx1. They cluster around 2 to 6 kt. Notably, the result from the Geophysical Survey of the Russian Academy of Sciences is basically in line with the others, and *not* with the announcement of the Ministry of Defense, which appears to float free of all observed data.

For whatever it’s worth, Kim Sung-han’s estimate — as reported in the NY Times and cited above — is also an outlier, but in the other direction.

Geoff has some thoughts about the “potential implications”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2311/north-koreas-design-choices of a ~4kt test for weaponization.

Andreas says it took place at a “second test site”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2312/greetings-from-geneva-more-on-mb-to-yield, not far from the first.

Art of the Blown Headline

Leave a reply

Back in March, a headline in the _Washington Post_ conflated a North Korean missile test with a nuclear test. ACA’s Peter Crail “blogged it here”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1946/_wp_-blows-nk-headline.

They’ve done it again, this time with “Iran”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/20/AR2009052000523.html:

bq. Correction to This Article
A headline and earlier versions of this article, including in the print edition of today’s Washington Post, incorrectly said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had linked a medium-range missile test to his country’s nuclear program.

Not that a connection between Iran’s nuclear and missile programs is in any way implausible — quite the contrary! But it would have been pretty remarkable for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to come out and say it.

Keeping Up With The Post-It

The _New York Times_ had a different boner in “their coverage”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/middleeast/21iran.html of the same event today:

Though she avoided details, Mrs. Clinton was giving voice to a growing concern among administration officials, who have now had time to review the intelligence, that Iran seems to have made significant progress in at least two of the three technologies necessary to field an effective nuclear weapon.

The first is enriching uranium to weapons grade, now under way at the large nuclear complex at Natanz. The second is developing a missile capable of reaching Israel and parts of Western Europe, and now the country has several likely candidates. The third is designing a warhead that will fit on the missile.

_Bzzt._

Let’s put it this way. If Iran were actually enriching uranium to weapons grade at Natanz, this would have been the biggest buried lede in decades.

Journalism. It’s harder than it looks.

Really, Really Ready

Leave a reply

If your memories extend way back to the summer of ’06, by gum, then you might recall “ReallyReady.org”:http://www.fas.org/reallyready/index.html, the Federation of American Scientists’ effort to improve on a certain U.S. Department of Homeland Security “website with a similar name”:http://www.ready.gov/. All built by a summer intern.

The _Washington Post_ wrote it up “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/09/AR2006080901706.html. The momentarily most famous summer intern in America wrote “her own, fuller version”:http://www.sts.virginia.edu/wip/contents/alumniandfriends/papers/Hesaltine_06_e.pdf of the story, too.

You remember all this, right? Good.

p{float: right; margin-left:2px;}. !/images/100.jpg!

Well, there’s another entrant in the race for most compelling online source of emergency information: the website of Israel’s “Home Front Command”:http://www.oref.org.il/14-he/PAKAR.aspx, conveniently available in four languages. Drop-down boxes (on the left side of the page in the “English version”:http://www.oref.org.il/14-en/PAKAR.aspx) lead to straightforward explanations of what to do in case of earthquake, fire, flood, terrorist attack, or ballistic missile warning. Not necessarily in that order.

Also very handy is this “map”:http://www.oref.org.il/670-en/PAKAR.aspx indicating how much time there is to reach a protected space after a missile warning, depending on locality. There’s even a version with “cheery little clip-art figures”:http://www.oref.org.il/sip_storage/FILES/7/1077.jpg that you can print out, carry around, or perhaps “stick on the fridge”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2009/05/on-every-fridge-in-israel/. All very practical.

Raised Middle Finger?

Leave a reply

In his first week or two in office, President “Obama told al-Arabiya”:http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/01/27/65096.html TV, “And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”

As it turns out, he said something slightly different during the “inaugural speech”:http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/20/obama.politics/:

bq. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Just in case you were wondering what BHO thinks of the IRI.

Now, more recently, the President said that “we’ll know within about half a year”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-President-Obama-and-Israeli-Prime-Minister-Netanyahu-in-press-availability/ whether Iran’s fist is unclenched:

bq. My expectation would be that if we can begin discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian elections, we should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there’s a good faith effort to resolve differences. That doesn’t mean every issue would be resolved by that point, but it does mean that we’ll probably be able to gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the year of this approach.

Here’s a prediction. By the end of the year — or by October, the date that “leaked out”:http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084405.html “earlier”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124225939853917439.html — President Obama won’t necessarily get either a clenched fist or an extended hand from Iran. He may catch sight of a more ambiguous digital posture, something that doesn’t foreclose options one way or another, but puts the onus on Washington to do so.

We’d all prefer an either/or deal, but that’s not the most likely thing, really.

Up and Running

Leave a reply

Paul will be inactive for awhile, but I’m back. Sort of.

It was good to get a break from blogging — so good, in fact, that I’m going to make a conscious effort _not_ to return to previous form. Really. I mean it. It’s amazing how much else you can get done when you don’t blog. I have a number of things to accomplish in the next couple of months, so please don’t expect an immediate return to the torrid pace of yore.

But I’m back.

Where Did The U Metal Come From?

9 Replies

A “short while ago”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2001/hibbs-on-syria-u-traces, we all learned some new stuff from Mark Hibbs about the uranium oxide particles found in Syria. Long story short, the IAEA has reason to believe they were uranium metal “converted” into oxide by… “some event”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1038934.html that divided the uranium into fine particles, causing it to scatter and oxidize.

Now let’s go further and assume that this uranium was, prior to its untimely fine division, fuel for a Yongbyon-type Magnox reactor. This raises an obvious question: Where did it come from?

Well, I think we can rule out “Lancashire”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1865/more-than-you-wanted-to-know-about-magnox. Instinctively, most of us would say, it came from the Yongbyon fuel fabrication complex in North Korea. It might also have come from a duplicate facility in Syria, although this assumes that quite a lot of stuff could have been built, supplied, and operated undetected.

Ask Dr. Science

The natural place to start is with “SIGINT”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1866/just-a-little-bit-more-information. In February 2008, according to Dr. Siegfried “Sig” Hecker, North Korea had under a quarter of a load of fuel rods — apparently for the infamous 5 MWe reactor that has produced all or essentially all of North Korea’s plutonium — and a full load of uncladded fuel rods for the unfinished 50 MWe reactor.

Is that everything that was supposed to be there? As it turns out, Hibbs has already looked into this question. He asked Hecker and wrote up his answer in the Dec. 18, 2008 issue of _Nucleonics Week_.

None of the safeguarded fresh uranium fuel produced by North Korea at its Yongbyon nuclear research center for two of its own reactors was diverted to an alleged clandestine reactor project in Syria, a US expert said December 15.

Siegfried Hecker, a director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in an interview that the fuel, which had been declared to the IAEA, was still at the center when he visited it in February.

OK. So what about the period after the collapse of the Agreed Framework and before the return of inspectors? Is it possible that the complex was put back into operation, making more fuel?

Let’s go back to Hecker’s “Feb. 2008 trip report”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1866/just-a-little-bit-more-information:

bq. 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.

It sounds as if A) the complex had only limited capacity during the dark period between 2002 and 2007, but B) the North Koreans were operating some (perhaps all) of the parts that worked, and C) they made efforts to reconstitute what wasn’t working (fluorination) on an _ad hoc_ basis. This element was not “put into full operation,” but that doesn’t mean that it produced nothing, either.

How much fresh fuel could these arrangements have created? Enough for the “test assembly” that one of Hibbs’s sources suggests Syria might have had at the reactor? It’s not really clear, but seems possible. Either way, it raises the question of where the Syrians expected to get a full load of fresh fuel in 2007, when Yongbyon was once again under safeguards. And no, I’m not even going to start speculating about reprocessing facilities.

Anybody Around Here Read Korean?

One way to know what happened at Yongbyon during the dark years would be to scrutinize the operating records of the fuel fabrication complex. There are forensic tests to establish the genuineness of such documents. But according to (you guessed it!) Mark Hibbs in the Jan. 12, 2009 issue of _NuclearFuel,_ these records were not among those provided by North Korea to the United States.

All together now: _Hmmmm._

So, it’s an open question. Any enterprising journalists out there want to take a stab at this one?

Just for fun: Hibbs quotes a “senior UN official” in the Feb. 23, 2009 issue of _NuclearFuel_ as saying that the particles “looked like UO2,” not other oxides. Also, a “Western safeguards official” said that — along with uranium oxide and graphite — there was lots of aluminum and magnesium in the IAEA samples from al-Kibar. That’s what Magnox fuel cladding is made of. But it might have come from the soil, too, right?

One thing is clear, at least: the Syrians won’t be letting the IAEA back in anytime soon.

After all that, you deserve a “musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xmSYS2uM0. Knock yourself out.

HRC is Worried

Leave a reply

Elise Labott of CNN “quotes the Secretary of State”:http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/22/clinton.pakistan/:

“I think that we cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by continuing advances, now within hours of Islamabad, that are being made by a loosely confederated group of terrorists and others who are seeking the overthrow of the Pakistani state, a nuclear-armed state,” Clinton said in an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday.

“I don’t hear that kind of outrage and concern coming from enough people that would reverberate back within the highest echelons of the civilian and military leadership of Pakistan,” she added.

Welcome to the club, Madame Secretary.

CNN goes on to quote “Ambassador Husain Haqqani”:http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/22/clinton.pakistan/, who rather articulately says what’s ~not~ wrong with the current policy of dithering and appeasement.

Elaine Grossman of Global Security Newswire “also quotes Clinton”:http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20090422_1960.php as saying that the Pakistan situation “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world.”

These are pretty remarkable remarks about a Major Non-NATO Ally.

Still. I promise that I’m not going to try to turn this into a “what’s-the-matter-with-Pakistan”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2006/putting-things-in-perspective blog. So, enough for now.

Update: Get your fix from “Bill Roggio”:http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/04/taliban_flex_muscles.php.

Update 2: And from “Jane Perlez and colleagues”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/world/asia/23buner.html. And “Glenn Kessler”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/22/AR2009042203913.html.