Foreign Policy Blogs

North Korea Uranium Enrichment

Seeking to limit fallout from the latest North Korean uranium enrichment disclosures, Obama officials have been implying they kind of knew about it all along, which is kind of true inasmuch as concern about the subject reached well back into the previous administration. But Siegfried Hecker, hands-down the leading authority on North Korean nuclear activities, has left no doubt in interview after interview that he was astonished and dumbfounded by the size and sophistication of the new enrichment plant.

Obviously the North Koreans could not have built a near state-of-the-art plant so fast without foreign assistance. So government and press speculation has been centering on which government might have helped. But even with technical advice from abroad the North Koreans would have needed components. That strongly suggests that the global supplier network assembled by A.Q. Khan still is not fully shut down.

This consideration may seem small at the moment, with the imminent danger of Korean war on everybody’s mind, but in the longer run it may be the bigger one.

 

Author

William Sweet

Bill Sweet has been writing about nuclear arms control and peace politics since interning at the IAEA in Vienna during summer 1974, right after India's test of a "peaceful nuclear device." As an editor and writer for Congressional Quarterly, Physics Today and IEEE Spectrum magazine he wrote about the freeze and European peace movements, space weaponry and Star Wars, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. His work has appeared in magazines like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and The New Republic, as well as in The New York Times, the LA Times, Newsday and the Baltimore Sun. The author of two books--The Nuclear Age: Energy, Proliferation and the Arms Race, and Kicking the Carbon Habit: The Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy--he recently published "Situating Putin," a group of essays about contemporary Russia, as an e-book. He teaches European history as an adjunct at CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College.