Center for International Policy

In the January/February 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, Selig S. Harrison, Director of the Asia Program, challenged the Bush Administration to support its accusation that North Korea has a weapons grade uranium enrichment program. This provoked a debate in the March/April 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs in which Harrison replies to his critics with the following letter.

If it were as easy as Reiss, Gallucci, and Garwin argue it is to enrich uranium to weapons grade in quantities sufficient for nuclear weapons, and if there were indeed credible evidence that North Korea has a program in place for doing so, one would have expected the Bush administration to put forward this evidence in its response to my article.

Instead, responding to my article on December 10, a State Department spokesman attempted to finesse the issue. Saying only that North Korea has a "uranium enrichment program," he carefully avoided a repetition of earlier accusations that North Korea has a military uranium program capable of producing two or more uranium-based nuclear weapons per year as early as this year. Similarly, Reiss, Gallucci, and Garwin blur the critical distinction between weapons-grade enrichment and lower levels of enrichment that are permitted by the NPT.

I hope that by the time this letter is published, the administration will have redefined its position on the North Korean uranium issue. Presenting credible evidence of a weapons-grade program would help to break the present stalemate in the six-party negotiations, putting North Korea on the defensive. China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia have been openly skeptical of the weapons-grade accusation and critical of a U.S. diplomatic strategy that conditions the start of negotiations on resolving this issue. Putting forward credible evidence would lead to a united diplomatic front in confronting Pyongyang--a united front that the administration has so far been unable to mobilize. Alternatively, if, as I hypothesize, there is not enough evidence to justify accusations of a weapons-grade program, the United States should shift to the "plutonium first" policy that I advocate and that Garwin endorses. The United States could then give priority to getting any plutonium reprocessed so far by North Korea out of the country, while providing for the elimination of any uranium-enrichment facilities at a later stage of a step-by-step denuclearization process.

The central thesis of my article is that the administration exaggerated the intelligence relating to the North Korean uranium-enrichment effort due to its broader agenda: reversing the Clinton policy of engagement with North Korea and, more particularly, abrogating the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which Pyongyang suspended plutonium-based nuclear facilities that could otherwise have produced some 30 nuclear weapons per year. Reiss and Gallucci brush aside this thesis, ignoring the arguments and analysis presented to support it.

As evidence of a bipartisan consensus on the uranium issue, they cite the fact that U.S. intelligence concerns over the possibility of a North Korean enrichment program originated during the Clinton years. Although it closely watched what the North Koreans were up to, however, the Clinton administration sought to head off a possible enrichment program through quiet diplomacy, avoiding a confrontation with Pyongyang that would jeopardize the gains made in controlling the plutonium danger under the Agreed Framework.

By contrast, President Bush openly expressed his desire for regime change in Pyongyang, and from the start, his most influential advisers looked for an excuse to abrogate the 1994 accord. They were (and are) ideologically opposed to providing material incentives that would help to sustain the Kim Jong Il regime in exchange for denuclearization. The result was a paralysis of U.S. North Korea policy until the summer of 2002, when the new intelligence on North Korean enrichment procurement efforts cited by Reiss and Gallucci gave them the desired pretext for abrogating the Agreed Framework. This amounted to throwing the baby out with the bath water, since North Korea predictably retaliated by reprocessing plutonium, an action previously barred under the 1994 accord.

The crux of the Reiss-Gallucci argument is that the new 2002 intelligence justified the CIA assessment that North Korea is making uranium-based nuclear weapons. I am not willing to accept this assessment on faith, considering the ideological agenda driving administration policy and the blatant misuse of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In my article, I spelled out numerous specific constraints that would make it difficult for North Korea to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and numerous specific reasons why the evidence leaked by the administration in support of the 2002 assessment should not be taken at face value. None of this analysis is acknowledged or addressed by Reiss and Gallucci. The most important of the constraints that I emphasize is the difficulty that North Korea faces in obtaining sufficient quantities of the many sophisticated components, such as the special grade of maraging steel required for rotors, needed to make centrifuges in quantities sufficient for a large-scale enrichment program. Reiss and Gallucci cite the exposure in April 2003 of a North Korean attempt to import high-strength aluminum tubes as if the attempt itself proves that Pyongyang actually acquired the tubes. I cite the same example to emphasize that the intercept operation worked and to question whether North Korea actually acquired the tubes.

I found a range of views among the experts I consulted concerning just how difficult it would be for North Korea to make and operate the thousands of centrifuges needed for large-scale weapons-grade enrichment. Most of them, however, emphasized that complex metallurgical and chemical techniques are involved in making centrifuges, and that moving from low levels to high levels of enrichment adds to the time involved and thus multiplies the risk of technical problems, such as the corrosion and breakdown of the rotors. This is the point I was seeking to make, and I regret that I confused the issue by incorrectly drawing a comparison between low and high levels of enrichment.

Among the many misrepresentations of my position and misstatements of fact by Reiss and Gallucci, I would like to single out one in the space available. I do not say that "the enrichment program is somehow not central to the nuclear challenge." Nor would my "plutonium first" proposal amount to "leaving Pyongyang in possession of the capability to continue its nuclear weapons effort." On the contrary, I emphasize that "measures to locate and eliminate enrichment facilities that can produce weapons-grade uranium are essential" and that the United States "should insist on stringent terms in a denuclearization process" to locate such facilities if they exist, including the imposition of the NPT's Additional Protocol providing for intrusive inspections.

On one key issue, Reiss and Gallucci appear to concur with my working hypothesis that the Khan network supplied North Korea only with prototypes and blueprints. If this is the case, North Korea would have to import all of the sophisticated components needed to make the large number of centrifuges required for enrichment and to overcome the technical obstacles inherent in this specialized manufacturing process. If Pakistan provided ready-to-use centrifuges in large numbers, the Reiss-Gallucci argument would be much stronger than it is, but so far no evidence of such transfers has surfaced.

The full debate can be viewed at the Foreign Affairs website.