John Bolton’s body is out of the State department,” commented Christopher Hill, US negotiator with North Korea, over lunch, “but his hand is still in.” Mr Bolton is seeking to shoot down Mr Hill’s promising February 13 denuclearisation agreement with Pyongyang by reviving the increasingly dubious 2002 CIA assessment that the Kim Jong-il regime has a secret weapons-grade uranium enrichment plant. Unless Mr Kim discloses where the plant is located and opens it up to inspectors, argue Mr Bolton and allies in the Bush administration, the denuclearlisation deal should be called off.

To counter the strategy of Mr Bolton, the former US undersecretary of state for international security and United Nations ambassador, Mr Hill has revealed it has never been certain whether there is such a plant. What the evidence does show, he said in a speech, is that North Korea imported equipment that could be used for uranium enrichment, but “it would require a lot more equipment than we know that they have actually purchased” to make the thousands of centrifuge cascades needed for a weapons-grade uranium enrichment facility.

The February 13 agreement provides for steps toward denuclearisation by North Korea in parallel with US movement toward the normalisation of relations. Pyongyang should account for how the suspect equipment was used in the denuclearisation working group set up under the accord. If, as North Korean officials have told me, it was used only for research and development to explore low-level enrichment for civilian nuclear power generation, Pyongyang should place this “laboratory” under international inspection.

Suspicions of North Korean interest in uranium enrichment were aroused by indications that Pakistan’s Dr Strangelove, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had given centrifuges to Pyongyang in exchange for missiles. But President Pervez Musharraf has disclosed that North Korea got only two dozen prototype centrifuges, not nearly enough to conduct even low-level enrichment. He has confirmed, however, that these centrifuges included Pakistan’s advanced P-2 model. This is what made the CIA jump when evidence surfaced in 2002 of North Korean efforts to purchase aluminium tubes that were just the right size to go with the P-2. As Mr Hill has emphasised, all that is known for sure is that Pyongyang “attempted to purchase aluminium tubes from Germany and that there are some indications that they were successful in getting some of these tubes elsewhere”. The International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded that “failures in Pyongyang’s procurement efforts suggest
that North Korea may still lack key components”.

It is unclear what led the CIA to say categorically in 2002 that North Korea was “constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more weapons per year when fully operational, which could be as soon as mid-decade”. In any case, administration hard-liners accused North Korea of cheating on the 1994 nuclear freeze agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration, which they regarded as appeasement. With Mr Bolton leading the charge, they seized on the CIA assessment as a rationale for abrogating the accord, shifting to a confrontational, regime-change policy.

This was not just an intelligence failure, it appears, but the distortion and exaggeration of intelligence to serve a political agenda, as in the case of Iraq. The results have been disastrous. It was only after the freeze was abrogated that North Korea resumed the accumulation of the plutonium that enabled it to conduct its recent nuclear test.

Given its evidence of equipment imports, the administration should have confronted North Korea through secret diplomacy and demanded an explanation. Its objective should have been to resolve the issue without disrupting the 1994 accord. But the administration wanted a confrontation.

If North Korea refuses to address suspicions about equipment imports, the denuclearisation agreement is likely to collapse.

Even if Pyongyang admits to a uranium R&D programme, Mr Bolton will no doubt argue against permitting it to proceed. But since North Korea is allowed under the NPT to make low-enriched uranium fuel for civilian reactors, Pyongyang is unlikely to move to full denuclearisation unless this right is accepted and unless it is permitted to acquire light-water civilian reactors for electricity when and if its nuclear weapons programme is dismantled.

The writer is director of the Asia programme at the Center for International Policy and author of five books on non-proliferation and Asian affairs.