Gordon Prather, former nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, discusses the Russian influenced history of N. Korea’s nuclear program, broken U.S. promises in the 1994 Agreed Framework, the Bush administration shutdown of diplomatic relations with N. Korea and the current NPT/IAEA-free environment that facilitated a N. Korean nuclear weapon test.
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For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
For those of you who hear these interviews only from the podcast at Antiwar.com, you do know it's a live show.
Two hours a day you can listen live at Antiwar.com slash Radio, chaosradioaustin.org or from my blog, thestressblog.com.
We're going to go ahead and start today's show by bringing up our first guest.
It's Dr. Gordon Prather, our in-house nuclear physicist at Antiwar.com, veteran of the Navy, former chief scientist of the Army, worked at Sandia National Laboratory, was an advisor to Senator Henry Bellman, and is extremely experienced in nuclear weapons technology and in the legal shenanigans and processes and so forth surrounding nuclear technology and how it is dispersed around this planet.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Prather.
How are you doing today?
Pretty good so far.
Well, that's good to know.
I'm glad to hear it.
Let's talk about North Korea and their detonation of a nuclear weapon the other day.
I'm sure the information is already pouring in.
Do we know how big of a yield this atomic test was?
Well, no.
All that we, I don't know who we are, the Russians claim to have done a seismic yield measurement and Russia borders the test site almost.
It's not very far from where the Koreans set off this nuclear weapon underground.
And the Russians said that the seismic yield that they measured was approximately that of the Hiroshima bomb, which was a different kind of bomb.
That was a uranium-235 gun weapon.
We don't know what the yield was because there was nobody there to measure it.
I mean, Truman, as soon as the damn thing got built, went over there and dropped it on a bunch of Japanese.
But at any rate, we never tested that device, and so we're not really sure what the yield was.
But the calculated yield was somewhere between 12 and 15 kilotons.
Now that was less than the yield of the Fat Man that we dropped on Nagasaki a few weeks later.
And we had tested that device, and so we had done some diagnostics.
So we were pretty sure what its yield, at least its design yield was, and it was more than that, as much as 20 kilotons.
Well, and what the North Koreans have is basically comparable to the Nagasaki bomb, right?
A plutonium implosion bomb.
If it went full scale, full yield, it would yield something like 20 kilotons.
And, of course, it didn't do that.
But, you know, I mean, killing a few hundred thousand people at Hiroshima, you know, that's on the way.
Yeah, hey, 15 to 20 kilotons is plenty.
Well, I think 12 to 15, something like that.
Let me finish this.
The seismic yield, I've seen some reports in places like the New York Times, that says, well, maybe it was an earthquake.
Well, you know, if the Korean can tell you when they're going to have an earthquake, you know, we need to get some of that technology.
Right.
Well, I'm living in L.A. now.
I would like to have them, you know, here.
Give me a warning.
Yeah, well, you know, and, of course, the closer you are to it, and the Russians are the closest to it, and the Chinese, but particularly the Russians, and they have a lot of experience in underground nuclear testing.
And their estimates are, I would say, the one to be believed.
And, of course, the original test, they said, was a few kilotons, and everybody else said, oh, yeah, right.
But, you know, you have to know, you have to have the site, the geologically, what would you call it, characterized.
You have got to know what the speed of sound is and the material and all that sort of thing.
And you need to have a fairly good idea of the depth of burial and all that sort of thing.
If you're going to get any kind of reliable yield from seismic.
Well, and the Russians have all that information, right?
They have all that capability now.
In fact, you know, and it's a black science.
We worked many, many years at it, perfecting it.
And this was at Nevada Test Site where we had a well-characterized site geologically.
And we knew exactly when the bombs were going to go off, and we were sitting there all ready and waiting, you know.
And it was only a few miles away from where the explosion occurred.
And so we got to be fairly good at it.
And we had the entire Nevada Test Site instrumented with what they call micro-barographs.
Well, you know, somebody in the chat room is pointing out that we have a giant military occupation in South Korea.
So shouldn't the Americans have all the instruments they need to come up with these, you know, yield measurements and so forth themselves instead of having to ask the Russians or anybody else?
Well, when I was a young person and worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab and did this sort of thing for a living, and then later at Sandia where I had a different responsibility with respect to underground nuclear tests.
But in any case, all that stuff was done, run by various private contractors, the Board of Regents, the University of California, and Maubel, AT&T ran Sandia.
And we did all of that for the Atomic Energy Commission.
Well, the Atomic Energy Commission doesn't exist anymore.
But the military, I was in the military side of this thing once upon a time too.
And they don't do that sort of thing, you know.
The AEC developed nuclear weapons per specifications of the military and developed them and tested them and produced them and then transferred them to the military.
And the military seldom was ever involved in the actual nuclear tests.
Sometimes they would sponsor a test to see how their components and things like that performed when hit by countermeasures and things of that nature.
But basically, as far as I know, the military never ever did have a seismic yield capability.
It seems like they would try to get one since we have this whole thing going on with North Korea testing.
All you've got to do is hire some Sandians to go over there, you know.
All right.
So let's rewind this thing a little bit and figure out what exactly is this story.
I'm sure you remember a few weeks back when North Korea was preparing their missile test.
Just with two or three days' worth of scare tactics on TV, the American people by 57 percent, according to Rasmussen anyway, were ready to start the Korean War all over again, Doc.
And, you know, we have a problem here.
The Soviet Union has fallen.
Communist China is not quite so communist anymore.
And yet North Korea is this last little Stalinist holdout, totalitarian dictatorship there.
And as all the people are starving to death, they're taking what wealth they have and building nuclear weapons out of them for little Kim Jong-il.
So, I mean, those are the facts.
I don't know.
You know, everybody else tries to imply that this means a threat to the United States, a threat to South Korea, a threat to Japan, a threat to something.
Something's got to be done.
There's got to be sanctions.
There's got to be this, that, the other thing.
But I would really appreciate, if I could rely on your expertise, sir, to go back to the end of the Cold War era, and I guess it was 1994 when Kim Il-sung died and his boy Kim Jong-il became the dictator there.
Bill Clinton sent Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State, to go over there and make a deal with Kim Jong-il, and he did.
Can you tell us, what was that deal, the agreed framework?
What was the purpose of it and what were the details of it, Doc?
Okay, before we go into that, because I might not get a chance to come back to it later, if 50% of the police, the Americans, feel that we ought to somehow or another invade or take military action against North Korea, they haven't been in, they haven't arrived yet in the 21st century.
I saw something the other day where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that we're not going to cede the Pacific to somebody.
Right, yeah, I saw that too.
Well, that's not up to her anymore.
And the United States, this American, I can never pronounce that word, hegemony?
Hegemony is how Thomas Johnson says it.
I'll go with that.
He's the expert, okay.
You know, back in 1994, when we're talking about this agreed framework having been agreed to between us and the North Koreans, and it also involved the International Atomic Energy Agency, and that's important.
But let me get back to that.
The 48th parallel was developed because at the end of World War II, when we were all preparing to invade, or at least we were on paper, we were planning on having to invade the Japanese homeland, the main island.
Somebody had talked Stalin into entering the war on the ground in Europe, in Asia.
And they went hauling in to the Korean Peninsula, which had been annexed by the Japanese way back in 1910.
And the occupation of Korea by Japan was just as bad as you might think it might have been.
And so the Russians came in from the North, and nobody came in from the South.
But the Russians were supporting this guy Kim Il-sung, or whatever you want to call him.
What was his name, the old man?
And America intervened on the side of the Vichy puppets of the Japanese and replaced the Japanese empire in the South there.
No, the Russians were allied with the people who had been insurgent all this time against the Japanese occupation.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, I'm saying then the U.S. came and took the side of the occupation forces.
Well, they didn't actually put boots on the ground.
The Russians had boots on the ground, sleeping down, you know, making good time, because they were allied with the Korean opponents of the Japanese occupation and annexation.
Okay, that's when the time that the Russians entered that war are a couple of days after Truman dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and a few days before he dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
And more and more historians and people like that are beginning to smell a rat, and they're beginning to think that the reason that Truman killed all those Japanese was to make a point to Stalin, whose armies were just, you know, going anywhere they felt like going, in Europe, or in Asia, or any other place.
Let's get this going here.
We've only got about 14 minutes left.
We've got to get to the agreed framework of Ninety-Four at some point.
Well, the point is that the Russians continued to have a great deal of influence in North Korea.
I'm sorry, the Soviets.
And so as the Soviet Union began to collapse, the Russians forced the North Koreans, who had already become signatories to the Nonproliferation Treaty, because they were forced to by the Soviet Union, then the Russians.
The Russians then said, okay, you've got to have all these facilities that we built for you or helped you build.
You've got to make them subject to an IAEA safeguards agreement, which they had not yet done.
And so in 1992, that's when this whole business started, that the IAEA began to have some problems with getting the North Koreans to completely be open with them.
And in particular, they claimed that, well, it looks to us like you probably have made more plutonium in those fuel rods that you've had in your reactor and you've taken out than you're declaring.
And therefore, we want to do chemical analyses of these particular fuel rods.
But anyway, that's where the whole hoo-ha began.
And so Hans Blix, who at the time was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported to the Board of Governors of the IAEA, and then they wrote a letter or they made some kind of request to the Security Council and said, look, these guys are not cooperating right.
Why don't you do something about it?
And the Security Council declined to do anything about it.
But in any case, this so annoyed the North Koreans that their programs were being taken to the Security Council.
They said, well, to heck with this and we'll just withdraw from the treaty.
And at that time, while this was all going on, there were joint U.S.
-South Korean military operations going on twice a year down there in South Korea.
And so they said, you know, this is obviously a threat to our security.
We're not going to allow you to come in and see every damn thing we've got.
And so we're withdrawing from the treaty.
And that's the groundwork for all of this flap that's gone on since.
So Bill Clinton, who had come in with everybody in the world to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty and abide by it, and to never test nuclear weapons ever again, and that was their professed over and over goal.
And it's almost exactly the same as the goal that Obama announced after he became president.
What I need from you is the story of the agreed framework and how it was supposed to work, how it worked up until Bush and Bolton and Dick Cheney took power, and then what they did to this deal that led us to a situation where North Korea is setting off nukes last weekend.
So that's kind of two parts, right, the Clinton years and the Bush years.
I just want to make sure that we can try to get through that before the bottom of the hour, Doc.
Okay.
The important point is that Clinton was horrified that North Korea was pulling out of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and so that's what caused him to send ambassadors and various people.
Robert Gallucci, for example, was one of the negotiators.
And they went there and they negotiated this agreement with the old man, I think, who was still alive when they negotiated it.
And I've actually been told by one of the negotiators that they didn't expect that regime to last very long.
They knew he was going to die, the old man, and so they figured they could promise almost anything because they'd never have to deliver on it.
So anyway, the result was the agreed framework of 1994 where the North Koreans agreed to not finish withdrawing from the treaty, to put everything they had of a nuclear nature under the lock and seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and to not do a whole bunch of other things.
And we, in return, were promised to supply them with nuclear power plants to produce electricity, and we promised to provide them fuel oil to generate electricity until those power plants came online.
We also promised that we would begin negotiations on normalizing relationships between us and the North Koreans and all that sort of thing.
And this is basically, it didn't have to be ratified by the Senate, but it was basically a treaty.
You had the force of that.
An executive agreement, they call it.
I guess so.
At any rate, so that was 1994.
And almost from the beginning, and Bill Clinton got what he wanted out of it.
The problem, of course, is the old man died and then the son came in, and the regime continued on.
And so by the time Bush became president, we had made promises that were by then supposed to have been fulfilled.
It had been six years, you know, almost seven.
Okay, well, at any rate, before he left office, Clinton decided, well, I better start trying to live up to our agreements because, after all, they're important.
And Bush came into office and almost immediately told the North Koreans and the South Koreans that he had no intention of abiding by anything that Clinton had done with respect to North Korea.
And so that's Bolton talking there.
And they canceled some meetings that were already arranged.
There were diplomatic meetings and all that sort of thing.
Well, at any rate, the next thing that happened was that in the beginning of 2002, we, Bolton and the rest of us, we called them on the axis of evil and we accused them of developing nuclear weapons.
And then in September of that summer of 2002, we made formal accusations that they had a secret uranium-235 nuclear weapons program that the IAEA didn't know anything about, and that therefore we were unilaterally abrogating this agreement, which they couldn't do because it involved North Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and you can't unilaterally abrogate trilateral agreements like that.
Well, now, hold on right there.
I want to make sure and get this right.
A bomb went off the other day, but all indications are that was made from plutonium.
This secret uranium enrichment program that they were accused of having, that was the excuse for Bush Bolton breaking the deal, still to this day there's not one atom of evidence on the planet that they ever started a secret uranium program at all.
I wanted to make sure to get that out there.
You can add right or wrong or whatever to it.
But also, I want to understand exactly the process of the breaking of the deal between I think it was the fall of 2002 when they made these bogus accusations, Doc, and then the spring of 2003 when the North Koreans finally said, all right, enough is enough, and quit the IAEA and the NPT.
No, you're right about when the accusations were made, and then they cut off the fuel shipments to allow the North Koreans to freeze in the dark the winter of 2002.
And so before the year was out, the North Koreans announced, well, to hell with this, we already had begun to withdraw from the treaty.
We gave the notice, and now we're resuming it again.
And so depending on whether or not they had to go the whole time or whether or not all they had to do was to finish the period, which was either six months or three months, and I've forgotten at the moment, but I think it's three months.
So in January of 2003, basically before Bush even invaded Iraq, they announced that they were withdrawing from the treaty and they were going to start up their reactors and they were going to separate out the plutonium from their spent fuel elements and they were going to make a whole bunch more, and they were going to rethink their whole rationale for their nuclear program.
Okay, so I just wanted to make sure I got that chronology right and I wanted to get those details filled in there.
It was America made false accusations and then the U.S. broke our side of the deal with them, suspending fuel oil shipments.
And then as a result of that, they withdrew from the nonproliferation treaty and kicked the IAEA out and began not making bombs out of uranium, as in the false accusation, but again out of plutonium harvested from the reactors left over from the days of the USSR.
That's right, and basically the last meeting that Bush had was I think it was with the president of South Korea that just committed suicide.
Right.
It was in Manila, somewhere like that.
Right, yeah, I like this story.
This is an important story.
We could only end the armistice, that is the war, between the North and the South there if the North Koreans gave up all of their nuclear weapons and their weapons programs, and he didn't, I don't think he said it specifically, but he was still alleging that North Korea had a uranium nuclear weapons program secret somewhere.
Yeah, and that was something that I know you've written about in your columns for AntiWar.com before, because the South Korean, I forget, president or prime minister or whichever, said, oh I'm sorry Mr. Bush, did I understand you right?
Did you say that we could start working toward moving from permanent ceasefire to an actual real end of the war and reunification talks before resolving the nuclear issue, or at the same time?
And Bush said, no, no, what I said was, you know.
Yeah, well, anyway, the point is, again, that the six-party talks, they made an allowance, the six parties, that there would be bilateral talks that were separate between us and North Korea, the U.S. and North Korea.
And that's the sort of thing that was the sticking point, because we kept maintaining, first of all, that they tell us where exactly this alleged enriched uranium nuclear weapons program was, and destroy it.
And second of all, that we quit, what would you call it, being unpleasant to the Japanese human rights and all that sort of thing.
Yeah, geez, you know, it's just amazing when you hear these two conditions, you know.
Wait, wait, the Japanese, you lost me there.
You meant the North Koreans?
The big thing with the Japanese has been for quite some time, not the nuclear weapons, it's been their, well it's all complicated, but it has to do with the racism that's endemic to Japan with respect to people like Koreans.
Oh, I see.
Well, what an unfortunate place to have to leave it with that issue brought up but unresolved.
But we have to go.
We've got another interview on deck that we've got to get to.
But I really appreciate your time on the show today, Doc.
Hope to talk to you again soon.
Okay.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gordon Prather.
He's our nuclear weapons expert at antiwar.com.
It's original.antiwar.com slash Prather.
