Or something. Appearing on Fox News on 14 April, the SecState “said”:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153546,00.html:

bq. Well, one of the problems with the 1994 agreement with North Korea is that North Korea really was already very developed on the nuclear side and it was a freeze of North Korean programs where the benefits were up front and the North Korean actions were later.

_All_ the benefits, Dr. Rice? We gave the North Koreans some heating oil, poured the foundation for one light water reactor, and eased some sanctions after several years. The “1994 Agreed Framework”:http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/af.asp required us to do a bit more than that, eventually.

As for North Korea’s “actions,” Pyongyang froze its Yongbyon reactor and related facilities, per the agreement.

It is also true that Pyongyang was taking longer than it should have to alllow the IAEA to finish its initial inspection of the North Korean nuclear facilities. But the Agreed Framework did not technically require North Korea to do so until “a significant portion of the LWR project [was] completed, but before delivery of key nuclear components.” Those components have never been delivered.

But all is well now, according to Rice:

bq. We have a much better situation with North Korea now where we are, even though the North Koreans continue to develop, apparently, their capability and continue to try to remind the world of that, they are now in a six-party framework in which they have to face not just the United States but also the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese and the South Koreans.

Do we need to get into how silly this is?

* Agreed Framework: Frozen plutonium program
* Now: Unfrozen plutonium program

Thank heavens the Bush administration is around to save us all from serious diplomacy, as well as rampant buggery.

Not really an arms control issue, but this is “just f*cking ridiculous”:http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm, if true.

Jonathan Landay writes:

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.

Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism.”
But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office ordered “Patterns of Global Terrorism” eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush’s administration’s frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

Which of those explanations sounds more compelling to you?

Wait, there’s more:

bq. A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was being eliminated, but said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was “categorically untrue.”

Bull.

Shit.

_Late Update_: Boucher says they will publish the report by 30 April, “sans statistical annexes”:http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2005/44770.htm.

ACT editor Miles Pomper has an “article”:http://www.armscontrol.org/aca/midmonth/2005/april/Bolton.asp coming out later today which (I think) addresses this issue in a bit more depth, but I thought I’d pass along the following tidbit.

Biden stated during Bolton’s hearing last week that the text of Bolton’s famous Cuba/BW speech that has been the subject of some controversy originally “called for international observers of Cuba’s biological facilities.”

Of course, it would help if there were any such observers. But there aren’t because J-Bolt saved us all from global tyranny by putting the kibosh on the BWC verification protocol.

Strong work.

_Updates_:

1. “Here’s the article”:http://www.armscontrol.org/aca/midmonth/2005/april/Bolton.asp.

2. Previous ACW coverage from “18 September 2004”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=37, “20 September 2004”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=35, and “19 October 2004”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=17.

Reuters “reports”:http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8143188:

Russia is likely to delay shipments of enriched uranium fuel to Iran to start up a Russian-built atomic power plant there until the autumn, a source in the Russian nuclear authority said on Monday.

[snip]

At the time officials said fuel shipments to the Bushehr plant may start as soon as April.

It would be helpful to know a little more about the “source.” And who are these “officials” whose claims differ from Russia’s official statements regarding Bushehr fuel delivery?

Although the fuel delivery schedule is — as far as I know — still secret, Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev “said”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_04/Bushehr.asp in February that the first shipment will occur “some six months” before the reactor begins operation in late 2006. How does the claim that Russia will “delay” shipments to Autumn 2005 jibe with Rumyantsev’s statement that such shipments won’t occur until mid-2006?

Now, if Moscow delayed the fresh-fuel shipment for Bushehr in order to presure Iran to cooperate fully with the IAEA/EU3, _that_ would be news. Indeed, a State Department official “told me”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_04/Bushehr.asp that Washington thinks Moscow may do something along those lines.

But nothing like that seems to be going on, at least according to he Reuters story. So what’s going on?

Has any Senate hearing witness ever before used the phrase “ream him a new one?” Sweet.

Amazing what passes for good news these days.

One of the Senators (Hegel, I think) asked Bolton a few minutes ago during the SFRC hearing why the United States didn’t listen to UNMOVIC and the IAEA when they said Iraq didn’t have WMD. During the course of his answer, Bolton said that the Bush administration had not disputed the IAEA’s claim that Iraq did not have a uranium enrichment program.

Right. This is what Cheney “told”:http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/cheneymeetthepress.htm _Meet the Press_ a few days before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq:

MR. RUSSERT: And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program, we disagree?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: *I disagree, yes.* And you’ll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community disagree. Let’s talk about the nuclear proposition for a minute. We’ve got, again, a long record here. It’s not as though this is a fresh issue. In the late ’70s, Saddam Hussein acquired nuclear reactors from the French. 1981, the Israelis took out the Osirak reactor and stopped his nuclear weapons development at the time. Throughout the ’80s, he mounted a new effort. I was told when I was defense secretary before the Gulf War that he was eight to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon. And we found out after the Gulf War that he was within one or two years of having a nuclear weapon because *he had a massive effort under way that involved four or five different technologies for enriching uranium to produce fissile material.*

We know that based on intelligence that he has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He’s had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. *And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted [his] nuclear weapons [program]. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong.* [Emphasis, Lewis]

My colleague Wade Boese has a great article in the “Prospect online”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9475. Check it out.

Interesting. Apparently some Senate staffers are looking into whether Bolton was involved in “pressuring intel analysts”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7369509/site/newsweek/regarding about their assessments of Cuba’s BW program.

Jeffrey wrote about this “a while ago”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=35. Relevant excerpts from the SSCI report included.

Larry Niksch (_right_) from CRS recently published an “interesting summary”:http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200503/200503200025.html of the relevant intel in the _Chosun Ilbo_.

Niksch mentions a pair of 1993 Russian intel reports that point toward a North Korean HEU program:

bq. There are also assessments from non-U.S. sources simultaneous with or earlier than those of the Clinton Administration. Of special importance are the Russian intelligence assessments of the 1993. Reports in two Japanese journals and the Russian newspaper, Izvestia, quoted from two Russian intelligence documents, an October 1993 Defense Ministry report entitled “The Russian Federation’s Military Policy in the Asia and Pacific Region Under the New Military-Political Conditions” and a 1993 report of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service on “Weapons of Mass Destruction in the World.” Both Russian assessments asserted that North Korea had an active uranium enrichment program.

I am curious as to whether anyone has a copy of the Russian reports . I haven’t been able to find them, but maybe someone with sweeter skills can.

Niksch also correctly points out that South Korean intel sources have been cited in the ROK press for a while now on this issue. Those have never quite been solid enough for _ACT_ to publish, but Seoul clearly seems to think that North Korea has some sort of HEU effort.

There is, however, still no good evidence that the program is, or was, as advanced as North Korea’s plutonium progam.

*As an aside*, when I was doing the reporting for the article I wrote last month about this subject, I couldn’t find anyone who would really defend the intelligence. Now, there are obviously people I missed who likely would defend it, but it’s interesting that no one else reporting on the matter is having much better luck.

_Update_: The sweet skills are on display in the comments section.

Bulletin to “Anne Applebaum”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18706-2005Mar8.html?referrer=email and others who argue that John Bolton’s “blunt” manner makes him “an ideal candidate to be America’s U.N. ambassador”: your boy has a history of doing stupid things. Competence matters, kids.

Case in point: “Bolton’s fave strategy”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_03/boltonmarch02.asp of naming countries who
(the US thinks) are violating international arms control agreements. Additionally, he simultaneously derides such agreements as ineffective, apparently appointing the US as judge of who’s behaving correctly and who isn’t.

The Iraq debacle obviously proves why this is asinine, but there is another example: Libya.

Before Libya decided to get rid of its WMD programs in December 2003, Bolton said several times that Tripoli was pursuing a biological weapons program. For example, he “told the BWC Review Conference”:http://www.acronym.org.uk/bwc/revconus.htm in November 2001 that:

bq. The United States believes that Libya has an offensive BW program in the research and development stage, and it may be capable of producing small quantities of agent.

He made a similar statement to the HIRC in June 2003. And in several other places.

Bolton even went so far as to issue a veiled threat against Libya in April 2003:

bq. we are hoping that the elimination of the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction would be important lessons to other countries in the region particularly Syria, Libya and Iran, that the cost of their
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially quite high.

The problem is that Libya had no BW program, just chemical and nuclear wepaons programs. A senior administration official “said at the time”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_01-02/Libya.asp that Libya “admitted to past intentions to acquire equipment and develop capabilities related to biological weapons” and had dual-use facilities.

As with Iraq, the administration might say “Well, seemed like a good idea at the time,” but the publicly available evidence suggests that the intel didn’t quite jibe with Bolton’s spiel. The public “CIA 721 reports”:http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/721_reports/jan_jun2002.html#6 from that time said that “Evidence suggested that Libya also sought dual-use capabilities that could be used to develop and produce BW agents”

Yes, we should be concerned about proliferation if/when the intel warrants such a concern. And sometimes intellligence is ambiguous/inaccurate. Fair play. But it’s just moronic to shoot your mouth off in public when you’re wrong AND simultaneously decrying everyone else’s inability to see the truth.

In case you were wondering, Bolton’s blunt BW talk accomplished exactly nothing when it came to Tripoli’s disarmament. Even the US doesn’t make that argument. [“more here”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_06/NewsAnalysis.asp].

P.S. There are 3 ACT interviews “here”:http://www.armscontrol.org/ for all you Bolton junkies.