John Kerry has promised that – as president – his highest priority will be preventing nuke proliferation. In stark contrast to Bush’s previous actions and future intentions, Kerry intends to work closely with – and through – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to achieve that end.
Everyone now knows that the IAEA was right about Iraq. And the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Bush used to "justify" the preemptive invasion and occupation of Iraq – which relied heavily on disinformation provided by the neocrazies and almost totally ignored a decade of IAEA authoritative reports on Iraqi nuclear programs – was wrong, wrong, wrong.
But, according to a New Yorker column by Seymour Hersh, published in January 2003, a few months before producing the Iraq NIE, the intelligence community had also produced a highly classified NIE on North Korea’s (DPRK) nuclear programs. Just before going to Congress with the Iraq NIE, seeking the authority to invade and occupy Iraq, Bush used the DPRK NIE to justify the unilateral abrogation of the U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework, precipitating the current DPRK nuke crisis that so worries Kerry.
According to Hersh, the highly-classified DPRK NIE "made the case" that North Korea had violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework by secretly obtaining the means to produce weapons-grade uranium.
DPRK officials have vigorously denied ever having such a program, continuing to deny it after expelling the IAEA monitors of the Agreed Framework, withdrawing from the NPT, restarting their plutonium-producing reactor and resuming recovery of weapons-grade plutonium.
Sig Hecker – former director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory – was even invited to come check out their "nuclear deterrent" earlier this year. They proudly showed Sig all their plutonium stuff. But when Sig asked to see the alleged highly enriched uranium program, Vice Minister Kim Gye Gwan immediately responded that the DPRK had no HEU program; nor any facilities, equipment or scientists dedicated to it.
But, according to Hersh, the NIE says the DPRK obtained prototypes of high-speed gas centrifuges from Pakistan in partial payment for DPRK ballistic missiles, and that by 2001, DPRK engineers were producing enriched uranium in significant quantities.
The DPRK NIE alleges Pakistan also helped North Korea conduct a series of “cold tests" – explosive tests, using non-fissile materials, necessary for determining whether an implosion device design functions properly.
Now, the nukes that Pakistan successfully tested in 1998 were HEU implosion-devices. But they were fairly sophisticated deuterium-tritium "boosted’ devices. No one has suggested that DPRK has a deuterium or tritium production capability. Hence, the Koreans couldn’t simply copy the Pakistan designs, even if they had the necessary HEU.
The easiest nuke to produce – the type the South Africans produced – is a HEU gun-type nuke, so simple as to not require testing. The DPRK is known to have enough weapons-grade plutonium to make several implosion-type nukes, but gun-type nukes can’t be made with plutonium.
Thus, according to Hersh, the DPRK NIE was not a consensus document, containing separate and contradictory estimates from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Department of Energy regarding DPRK’s nuke capabilities.
We have recently shared our "slam dunk" intelligence with the Chinese, and they found it unconvincing, to put it politely.
Shortly after the DPRK NIE was produced, a Bush weenie accused a DPRK official of having an illicit HEU-nuke program, and he allegedly admitted they did. There were immediate media reports that Pakistan was a possible source for the illicit program.
Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, characterized the reports as “absolutely baseless,” and added, “There is no such thing as collaboration with North Korea in the nuclear area.”
Before Bush invaded Iraq – but after Bush had abrogated the Agreed Framework, triggering the DPRK withdrawal from the NPT and the restart of their frozen plutonium production facilities – Hersh says an American nonproliferation expert told him, “It’s important to convey to the American people that the North Korean situation presented us with an enormous military and political crisis. This goes to the heart of North Asian security, to the future of Japan and South Korea, and to the future of the broader issue of nonproliferation.”
The DPRK NIE is apparently still "close hold." Even Kerry may not have seen it, yet.
Iraq was never a nuke proliferation threat, but Kerry charges the DPRK – thanks to Bush – now is. So, irrespective of who wins the election, perhaps Congress ought to take a long, hard look at the DPRK NIE provided to Bush – but perhaps not to Congress – several months before the now thoroughly discredited "slam dunk" NIE on Iraq.
