07/17/08 – Peter Crail – The Scott Horton Show

I've got to tell you all, I'm just full of praise for George W. Bush today.
What a hero in establishing his legacy as a peacemaker and dealmaker, and a guy who wants to use the State Department to resolve issues that we have, outstanding with other countries in the world instead of the Pentagon.
What a brilliant man.
What a wonderful legacy.
And a big part of that is the piece that he's making with North Korea.
And here to discuss the current state, basically, of the six-party talks and the negotiations going on between the DPRK and the other major Pacific powers is Peter Crail.
He's an analyst at Arms Control Association.
It's armscontrol.org.
Welcome to the show, Peter.
Thank you.
We're trying very hard around here to encourage George Bush's peacemaking as what makes for a great legacy, rather than dropping bombs on people.
What do you think?
Certainly, that's an excellent idea.
It has been good to see that, especially in the last couple of years, there has been a shift in policy regarding dealing with some of the countries that we're most concerned about.
It's unfortunate that some of those shifts did not come earlier, but in some of these cases where we are seeing some progress, I think credit should be given where credit is due, and that hopefully whoever comes in next will learn some lessons from both our successes and failures.
All right.
So I guess the most recent big news that I know of is that at the end of June, Koreans turned over a final report or some kind of thing to the Chinese, and then everybody else is supposed to get a copy.
Did that happen?
Right.
What the North Koreans gave is a declaration, which is supposed to detail a lot of different parts of their nuclear weapons program.
It doesn't detail everything.
There are some things that we were really looking for that weren't in this declaration, but the fact that we now have a document from the North Koreans that says what they were up to with their main nuclear weapons program, that's a pretty big deal.
It's an issue that we've been dealing with for decades now.
What this does is it starts the process to really answer questions about what they were up to and start to try to roll that back so that we can deal with their nuclear weapons program and hopefully in the future, in the long term, work towards normalizing relations and calming things down on the Korean Peninsula.
Well, Peter, I have to tell you, when I was reading your most recent article at armscontrol.org about this, I think I found the part that got John Bolton so mad, and I have to tell you I was completely taken aback that George Bush would go along with this, if I understand it correctly, that so far they're answering questions about their old Soviet reactors, Soviet-era reactors, and they're shutting those down, but the question of how many bombs they've made and when they'll be taken apart and made into not bombs anymore is left open for the future.
Is that right?
That is essentially right.
The folks from the John Bolton School and other hardliners who were instrumental in the administration's initial policy with North Korea of basically trying to isolate the North Koreans, and apply pressure to basically try and hope to bring down the regime, they're quite upset that we're engaged in a negotiation process where we're getting bits and pieces from the North Koreans, we're giving them a few things as well, but we're not getting everything all at once.
And the issue is that the North Koreans are notoriously difficult to deal with in these negotiations, and just because we don't have everything up front doesn't necessarily mean that we can't address it at some point in the future.
Right now, the negotiators that have been involved in the process now have been saying it's a process.
When we get something from them, it doesn't mean that that's the final answer.
So that's it, and the end all and be all of the negotiations.
Yeah, well, that sounds right.
I mean, the more welfare we're giving them, frankly, then the harder it is for them to break the deal and go back to the way it was again.
Right.
Well, not only is there a little bit of trust that's built in and do this give and take process, but once we try and move forward and actually send people there, have people on the ground trying to check out their facilities and everything, it allows us to ask more questions and get more answers about these things rather than disengaging and just waiting to see if the North Koreans are either going to give in and give us what we want or waiting for the North Korean regime to collapse, which some in the United States were hoping that that was going to happen since the 90s, but it hasn't happened.
So waiting for the regime to change itself or try to take efforts to force that to happen, that hasn't been successful.
Well, it's worth reviewing, I think, what happened in 2002, early 2003, when the United States claimed.
It's funny because if you Google this and look around, you'll see numerous reports, especially brought in Sanger in the Times and really all over the place, talking about how the North Koreans admitted that they had a secret uranium enrichment program, and yet the source for that is simply John Bolton says that they admitted it to one of his underlings, right?
But there's no evidence that they ever admitted anything of the sort.
Well, there's a major dispute since 2002, and the evidence behind it, the U.S. intelligence community does believe that the North Koreans were up to something.
One of the major questions is what exactly was it that they were doing, how serious was it, and how much was it really worth it to cut off negotiations at that point over something which may have been not as serious as we thought.
And what happened at the time is that the intelligence community thought that the North Koreans were involved in a major uranium enrichment effort, which is basically another path to nuclear weapons they were pursuing, in addition to the one that we knew about.
Since then, there's been a lot of backtracking within the intelligence community about how serious that was.
Now, very few people actually think that there was some major facility that was going on, and that they may have been doing some research, they may have been procuring some materials.
We know, at least according to the Pakistanis, Pakistani President Musharraf had said in his autobiography that this illicit network running out of Pakistan had provided the North Koreans with something related to uranium enrichment.
So there's a lot of suspicion that there was something that the North Koreans were up to, and that's part of maintaining the current negotiations process and verifying what was going on is to try and figure that out.
But what we've seen since 2002 is that what we thought was there probably wasn't there, and it probably wasn't worth walking away from the existing agreement at the time, and leading to what we have now, where the situation is quite a bit worse.
Well, it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm obviously only kind of partially layman-style informed over here, but I know that the AQ Khan Pakistani network there had sold a bunch of stuff to Libya, but it was just sitting in boxes in a warehouse.
And I don't know of any reason to believe, do you, that the North Koreans actually were doing any sort of enriching at all?
Maybe they bought some equipment from the Pakistanis, but do you know of any evidence that they actually did have uranium enrichment going on besides that they bought the equipment?
And do you know of any other real source that they admitted to such things besides John Bolton says so?
In terms of the North Korean admission, there were folks at the – people who were involved in the negotiations there where supposedly the admission was made.
The head of the delegation there, James Kelly, had said that that was the case, as well as the interpreters with the State Department who were involved there.
They claimed that the North Koreans did basically admit it.
I would say not quite.
So it's really not very clear what exactly was said.
Was it a real admission?
Was it a suggestion that, well, maybe this is something that we can try and work out as part of the deal?
It's sort of a he said, she said sort of situation.
And in terms of evidence, clear evidence about what the North Koreans were up to, at least there's nothing really that's out in the public about there was definite work that they were doing.
Well, we know when they tested their bomb, it was a plutonium bomb, not a uranium bomb, right?
Yes, it was.
Now, there have been new stories that have been coming out about contamination, enriched uranium contamination from the documents that they gave us and some of the equipment that they had showed U.S. officials at the end of last year, which could be suggestive of some work that they were doing.
But it's not clear right now whether or not that was something that was done in North Korea or if it was something if the contamination came from Pakistan, for example.
There was a situation that when we were dealing with Iran, there was some contamination that was found and it seemed to be consistent with that it was believed to have originated in Pakistan.
So it's possible that that happened, but right now we don't know.
Well, you know, Dr. Gordon Prather, who's our in-house nuclear physicist at Antiwar.com, he points out that the North Korean reactors, the Soviet era ones, actually used to run on almost weapons grade highly enriched uranium, 80-something percent, very high grade, and that it was Charles Schumer had a program in the Congress that paid for this thing to help convert energy reactors that run off of such high grade uranium to run off of much lower grade, lower percentage of enriched uranium or even natural uranium.
But that it's very plausible that there would be all kinds of HEU contamination, God knows where in North Korea, from back in the days.
No, that certainly is possible.
One of the difficulties is that you can't really date when the stuff was actually created, which is one of the reasons why we'd like to go in there and verify and talk to the North Koreans about what was going on.
The main reactor they've been using does not run on highly enriched uranium.
The main one, it basically runs on natural uranium, but it is possible that from far back during the early days of their nuclear program that this stuff was still around, the contamination is still present.
So it's going to be tricky getting down to the bottom of that.
My thing is, I'm not Kim Jong-il's defense lawyer or anything here, but it just seems to me that the American War Party, well, somebody like John Bolton, when he goes on TV, which seems like just about every day, everything out of his mouth is pure black and white and no nuance and no other possible explanations, and we know that they're doing this and they're doing that and all these other things, and basically they're lying by omission when they talk like that.
Well, there have been certain cases when we know that a certain activity is going on and we've turned out to be wrong.
There was a pretty notorious incident in North Korea several years ago where there was a facility where we thought that they had a reactor that they had in secret, a place called Kumchon-ri, and we asked for an investigation, and it turned out that there was nothing going on there.
So we do have to be careful of incidents like that.
In that situation, the North Koreans agreed, but they wanted to be compensated for that, so it turned out to be very expensive to carry out that inspection, which turned up with nothing.
Yeah, well, you know, they had an advanced nuclear weapons program in Iraq, too.
I think it's in the tunnels under Saddam's palaces.
Right.
Prime example, the most recent prime example of how we officials said, well, we know that there's such and such activities going on, but I guess they might have a different idea of what knowing actually is.
Well, you know, when it comes to the accusations about the uranium enrichment in 2002 leading to the North Koreans withdrawing from the NPT and kicking out the IAEA inspectors and embarking on a program to actually begin making nuclear weapons out of plutonium and so forth, it seems to me that this was just a plot, that they knew that they were lying or exaggerating the certainty about whatever uranium activities were going on in there because they wanted the American War Party, the hawks in the White House, that they wanted to, like you said, force a regime change from within, force the collapse of the government, and they figured if they could kick Kim Jong-il off all the welfare that he was getting from the agreed framework from 1994, that his regime would just fall.
So they wanted to lie and break the deal on our end in order to force him out of the NPT and the IAEA and all that, make him the bad guy, and then hope for the best.
It just turned out not to work out for what they thought the best.
Well, there were certainly people in the 90s in Congress and then in the Bush administration who did not like the agreement that we had with the North Koreans, which is the agreed framework which we entered into in 1994.
Now, even at that time, even the people who were involved in the 1994 agreement, there were already suspicions about what other activities the North Koreans were up to.
There was a realization that this wasn't perfect.
It didn't capture everything.
We couldn't entirely trust everything that the North Koreans were telling us, but it was the best thing that we could get at the time, and it was worthwhile to try and see it through and hopefully, in the end, try and deal with the other things that we were also concerned about, but not concerned about as much as the program that we did know about and that we knew about because we were actually there.
So in 2002, I think it is likely that those who wanted to take a far harder line on North Korea saw this as an opportunity to say, well, look, here's something that is a clear deal breaker.
Let's just pull away from the process.
And the problem with that is over the last several years after that, we saw the North Koreans expand the amount of plutonium that they produced and actually detonated a nuclear device in 2006, and our negotiating position with them after that point was a lot weaker than it was before.
They had 10 or so weapons and had actually carried out a test.
We're trying to do a lot of the same things that we were doing prior to 2002, but the situation is even more difficult to deal with at this point.
Well, and it seems like they got a better deal out of us now.
They got more money, and also, if I understand this right, and this gets into the complicated stuff, the Chinese and the Russians are now mandated to do their part in the verification, which basically takes that power and influence out of the hands of the United States.
Well, the Chinese and the Russians, right now, before the 1994 agreement, that was primarily between the United States and North Korea.
There were others that were involved in providing some of the incentives to the North Koreans, but in terms of the commitment that was made, it was the North Koreans and the United States.
Now the process has broadened, which has helped quite a bit, to include both the Chinese, the Russians, as well as the South Koreans and the Japanese.
Having others involved in the verification process, I think, is a good thing.
Hopefully, the International Atomic Energy Agency can have an involvement as well that isn't incredibly politicized, and that it's something that all the parties involved can be satisfied with.
So I don't think that having others involved necessarily hinders or makes the process less satisfactory to us.
For the most part, it has been the United States that has been taking the lead on dealing with the North Korean facilities.
Right now, we've been disabling them over the last year, basically making them temporarily unusable.
It's an arrangement that the North Koreans have been happy with and the North Koreans, actually, would rather work with the United States than others in the process.
Why is that?
Well, they see the issues mainly as a bilateral one.
Well, one, the North Koreans, they don't like the Japanese.
They really distrust the Chinese.
And what they see is that while their main problem is with the United States, they're the country that can really guarantee their security.
So they would rather cut through dealing with the Chinese and the Japanese in particular.
They have their own issues with trying to work with the South Koreans, mostly on their economy.
But they'd like to cut through the others and basically cut through the middlemen and just deal with the United States.
Now, I know in the 90s, part of the agreed framework, and I don't know if they ever followed through with this.
I know that the Clinton administration and the early years of the Bush administration, they really dragged their feet on a lot of this stuff.
But part of the deal was to give them light water reactors so they could have nuclear power, but it wouldn't be able to produce weapons-grade plutonium or anything like that.
Correct.
Is that part of the new deal that we've made in place of the agreed framework now?
No, it isn't yet.
What happened with the agreed framework is that there was a consortium that was created to construct the light water reactors.
Wasn't it Rumsfeld's company or he was working on the board of directors or something for the company that was supplying the reactors for that?
I don't believe so.
It was an international consortium which had membership of a number of countries, including countries in the region and Europe.
So it was more of a multilateral, multinational effort.
But the reactors weren't constructed.
We started laying the foundations for them, but the process was delayed to the point that once the agreement fell apart, the construction hadn't actually taken place.
Right now, the light water reactors are not part of the deal, but the North Koreans, every now and then, they've expressed their interest in getting light water reactors.
They've said that they expect it to be part of the deal at some point.
Right now, the idea has kind of been finessed that there was an agreement in September of 2005 that said that we can discuss them at a certain point when it's an appropriate time.
Of course, everyone has a different idea of what their appropriate time is.
The North Koreans want it sooner rather than later, and the United States and others want to try and make sure that the program is dismantled for as much as possible before we even start talking about that.
So it's something that I think will inevitably come up in the future.
So far, it's been avoided right now.
But when we get to the real serious issues about getting the North Koreans to actually give up whatever weapons they have, to give up all the material that they create, all the plutonium that they produce, I think at that point, it's going to become a pretty serious expectation on their part, and we'll have to see where the negotiations go then.
Now, I don't even think this is particularly scandalous or anything, but just for trivial pursuit's sake, it was ABB, the European engineering giant based in Zurich, that was putting this deal together, and Rumsfeld was the only American to sit on the board of the company.
He was a non-executive director of ABB at the time.
Anyway, not that that really matters.
Do we know how many nuclear bombs they made?
The estimates vary.
Usually, we're looking at anywhere between six and 12.
At the very most, it may be pretty high, but it's around that.
It's probably more towards six.
But the estimate is really just how much plutonium they produced.
We have no idea how much they actually turned into a weapon.
It's possible that it was just the one that they had detonated in 2006, but they may have made more.
So it depends on a lot of different things.
When George Bush removed the North Koreans from the state sponsor of terrorism list, what were they on that list for in the first place?
They support Hezbollah or what?
There are a lot of different things that are listed, but what the State Department generally said over the last couple of years or so was that there have been no indications that the North Koreans have been involved in terrorist activity over the last decade or so.
They were involved in—they were mostly attacks on South Koreans.
There was an airline bombing that occurred in the 70s.
There were also abductions of both Japanese and South Korean citizens.
But since that time, their involvement in specifically terrorist acts hasn't really been significant.
And so one of the things that they said when they came off of the list was that they pledged not to engage in terrorist activities in the future, and they also haven't been involved in any for the past six months.
There were still the issues regarding what to do about— the Japanese have been very adamant about dealing with their abducted citizens, and that raised a problem for U.S. and Japanese relations.
And there are also concerns about what North Korea was doing with other states that are on the terrorism list.
Such as Syria.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that was my next question for you.
What about that?
There are so many different reports about what was really going on there that I don't think I know which one to believe.
There's generally you and me both.
There have been a lot of different stories about that.
And there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered.
I tend to not believe there was really anything nuclear going on there at all.
What do you think?
I think the evidence pretty strongly suggests that what they were engaged in was building a nuclear reactor.
Now, in terms of other parts of a nuclear weapons program that they would need, if they wanted to build nuclear weapons, that's something that was still really left unclear.
What were they going to use to fuel the reactor?
And once they took the fuel out, what were they going to use to separate the plutonium to actually make weapons?
So I think that there's still a lot to find out about what exactly was going on, how long and how much the North Koreans were involved.
But there are also a lot of different stories about an Iranian connection and that the facility was going to be used to help Iran or it was a place for the North Koreans to shift their program.
I think that there really isn't any evidence for that.
But what does seem clear is that the Syrians were involved in building a nuclear reactor there.
There are also questions about, well, was bombing the best way to deal with it rather than the IAEA to try and get to the bottom of what was going on.
I know that at the time, right after that happened, I guess it was still in September of last year, I talked to Joe Cirincione about this, and he said, listen, the Syrians' nuclear program is like what you have there at the J.J.
Pickle facility in Austin, the research reactor, UT student stuff, not the kind of thing you could make a nuclear, they have no capacity to make a weapons program.
And I just, without really understanding the details, other than I've seen, obviously, Photoshop pictures in the New York Times purporting to be evidence, and this narrative, just looking at it from the outside, the North Koreans and the Syrians were helping the Iranians make plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Yeah, right.
And the proof for that is a CIA agent's destroyed laptop, but trust us, that's what it said before we destroyed it.
Right.
I think the Iranian connection, I don't buy.
At least the idea that this was something that was being made for the Iranians, considering they have programs that are ongoing that are far more sophisticated than some old 1960s vintage reactor in another country, I don't buy that.
Now, originally when the story came out in September, I think a lot of us who were looking at this stuff were really skeptical of the idea that the Syrians were building some secret nuclear reactor with North Korean help.
I think I agreed with Joe at the time that it didn't make sense for a lot of reasons.
There had been cooperation between Syria and North Korea on other things, missiles in particular, and that's what I thought it was most likely to be.
And the Syrian, their capacity to do this, I think, was really doubtful.
I think since then I've been convinced that this was actually a reactor that didn't necessarily mean that they had a full-fledged nuclear weapons program that was going to be an imminent threat because we don't know what was involved in certain other key aspects of a nuclear weapons program.
But I think at this point, going back to North Korea, it's another thing that we would like to at least get some answers to, and I think that the best way to get those answers is to continue with the Six-Party Talks process and maintain our engagement with the North Koreans so that we can try and gradually work through a lot of these issues that we have with them.
Can you tell me what it was that changed your mind about what was going on there in Syria?
Because I really don't like not knowing things, especially when I know that there's something to know but I don't know it.
So what is it I need to go back and read here that I missed?
I'm not a technical expert, personally, so I think that...
Well, me either.
Believe it.
Some of the analysis that I'd seen, both by the intelligence agencies as well as from other outside analysts, including people like David Albright, who had been looking at this for a while, I think that it, as well as some of the activities that the Syrians had engaged in afterwards, covering the site and then clearing everything before inspections could actually take place, I think that all of those things put together, I think, were fairly convincing.
If we look at what...
For example, in 1981, when the Israelis bombed a reactor in Iraq, there was an uproar about it.
The Iraqis were public about it.
They had complained publicly.
And one question was why the Syrians, if they really wanted to prove that there was nothing nuclear involved there, they could have invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to come right away before they cleared the site away to show and provide a pretty definitive argument that, well, look, this was not a nuclear facility there.
So I think there are things that the Syrians could have done and would have been expected if there was nothing going on there.
Now, of course, it's possible that the Syrians just had...
There were other things going on that the Syrians didn't want to have known.
But I think that in terms of all the different areas of evidence that had come out since then, I think it's...
I'm at least convinced of that.
And I think the question of what should have been done about that facility I think is an important one for you to carry on in the future, especially now that we're talking about...
You know, there have been suggestions about military action against Iran's facility.
And I know that you've written about this situation with the tenors in Germany and Switzerland there.
This had the laptop that seemed to indicate, I think they say, that they were working on...that the Iranians had gotten their hands on some new advanced design for a plutonium bomb and that that seemed to correlate with this idea that they were making plutonium for the Iranians there in Syria, that kind of thing, right?
I haven't seen anything to really connect the information that was found regarding...or the files found related to the tenors with the files in Iran, what Iran was up to.
It may be possible that there's a connection, but I haven't seen that yet.
I think what's been said is that there's a concern that, well, if the tenors had this other Pakistani design and it's likely that other members of the AQ Khan network had the same design and the Iranians were getting all of this stuff from the network, well, possibly the Iranians could have gotten this design from AQ Khan.
It's a possibility there.
I don't think there's been any evidence to show that that was necessarily the case and the laptop that's been discussed related to Iran was something that was supposedly something that a senior Iranian technician was working on.
All right.
Now, I guess to finish up, back to North Korea.
What's the next step from here to make sure that we don't slip back to the conflicting positions that we had in the past years?
Well, I think the first thing, at the early next month, North Korea is supposed to come off of the terrorism list.
This has been something that several members of Congress don't like.
I think the first thing is we started that process.
We made that commitment as part of the agreement we made over the last year.
While we haven't gotten everything that we wanted from the North Koreans yet, I think the main thing now is to continue to fulfill our end of the bargain.
Right now, we're supposed to start, or at least in the next few weeks, we're supposed to start talks on what kind of verification we're going to have in North Korea to check what they provided in the declaration and to see what was going on with their plutonium program.
I think that's a critical step, and we should be wary of doing anything now that will really jeopardize that.
That's the near term, and I think that once we do that, then we should continue to move forward to permanently dismantle their main facilities, remove the spent fuel that we've taken out of their reactor, which has more plutonium that could possibly be used in the future.
We want to take that out of the country and maintain that process so that we can try and work forward to deal with some of the more contentious issues in the future, including whatever they were doing with Syria, including uranium enrichment, including the weapons that they made.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time today, Peter.
Everybody, that's Peter Crail, analyst at the Arms Control Association.
That's armscontrol.org, and the publication is called Arms Control Today.
Really appreciate your time on the show today.
Sure thing.