WMD Challengers: North Korea

WMD Challengers: North Korea

Despite China’s support to the North, it seems clear that the potential for Pyongyang to provide weapon-usable nuclear substances or atomic equipment to foreign nations continues to be a worry and poses “new challenges to international non-proliferation efforts”. Besides the US, Israel and other nations have also accused North Korea of illicitly aiding Syria in building an atomic reactor that was demolished in a 2007 Israeli air strike. The International Atomic Energy Agency is probing this matter. There is enough evidence to suggest that Pyongyang’s uranium enrichment programme is “primarily for military purposes”. If peace is to prevail in East Asia, Pyongyang must abandon its uranium enrichment programme and all aspects of its nuclear programme should be placed under international monitoring. How to check Pyongyang from being a proliferator remains a huge challenge for the international community.

There are many gaps and weaknesses in international transportation and cargo regimes and Pyongyang has taken advantage of these shortcomings to transport its weapons to customers. Indeed, Pyongyang has specialised in setting up fraudulent firms and offshore banking operations, and has been employing people with fake names to cloak the identities of blacklisted firms and officials to undertake its illegal operations. For example, the expert panel report found that the sanctioned Korea Mining Development Trading Corp. has four fake names identified by the UN sanctions committee as well as 12 other identities that were not designated.

In November 2010, North Korea allowed the US nuclear weapons expert, Siegfried Hecker, to view the approximately 2,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges at its previously secret facility. Hecker and many other specialists assert that “it is highly likely” that there are other uranium enrichment-related plants in North Korea that have not been revealed. In May 2011, the US special envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, was dispatched to Seoul for talks with the South Korean officials on North Korea’s requests for food assistance as well as respite from the current nuclear impasse. Though Bosworth did not comment on the expert panel report, he condemned North Korea’s uranium programme.
North Korea missile threat must be addressed

Bolton 7-14-11 – John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “North Korea edges toward next nuke test,” http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/14/north-korea-edges-toward-next-nuke-test/

A real strategy, which we need much sooner than later, would require understanding that the DPRK and Iranian threats, including cyberwarfare, are two sides of the same coin, not unrelated outbreaks of nuclear contagion. The United States must take both seriously, reversing our present course of ignoring both.

Waiting passively for a third DPRK nuclear test is unacceptable, although that might be the only event to motivate Mr. Obama to pay at least lip service to combating Pyongyang’s continuing threat. By removing the public spotlight from the North - and its customers and suppliers - his administration has made it easier to evade existing sanctions and harder to impose new constraints absent another attention-riveting underground test. Moreover, Seoul is keenly aware of the North’s impending succession crisis and is likely prepared to take a much tougher line than in recent years.

At a minimum, therefore, we must press China and Russia far harder to quarantine North Korea’s trafficking in nuclear and missile technologies and materials. Unfortunately, the administration’s startling passivity means missing opportunities, which we will all regret very soon.

You wouldn’t know it from the Obama administration, but North Korea’s global threat continues to metastasize. South Korea recently concluded that extensive cyber-attacks against civilian and military targets in the South emanated from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Following China’s lead in information warfare, the North is creating yet another asymmetric military capability it can deploy against its adversaries and also peddle for hard currency to other rogue states and terrorists.

Although Pyongyang limited its targeting of this particular sortie to South Korea, the potential cyberwarfare battlefield is global and includes the United States, which already is the subject of extensive cyberprobing, exploitation and espionage by China. For a country perennially on the brink of starvation, North Korea’s military foray into cyberspace demonstrates its continuing malevolence.

The DPRK’s nuclear-weapons program has not rested on its laurels, either, with widely observed surface-level preparations for a possible third underground test well under way.

The North’s development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads is also advancing apace, as Russian missile designer Yuri Solomonov highlighted last month in a Kommersant interview. This is hardly surprisingly given Iran’s increasing long-range capabilities, the extensive Tehran-Pyongyang collaboration, and their programs’ common base in Soviet-era Scud missile technology.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan has released documents purportedly showing prior North Korean bribery of senior Islamabad officials to grease the transfer of nuclear or ballistic-missile technology. While their authenticity is disputed, the documents are part of Mr. Khan’s continuing campaign to prove he did not act solo in the world’s illicit nuclear-weapons bazaar.

Clearly, North Korea’s weapons programs are not decelerating even amid intensive preparations for a possible transition of power, following Kim Jong-il’s death, to a third member of the communist Kim dynasty. But faced with these challenges, the Obama administration has been not only publicly silent but essentially passive both diplomatically and intellectually. Only the Pentagon and the intelligence community, fortunately still implementing the Proliferation Security Initiative, have done much beyond noting pro forma that the troublemaking DPRK is still at it.