c***y
发帖数: 286 | 4 let's read the full text here. The title is totally off the hook:
Last month, U.S. nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker paid his fourth visit to
North Korea, where he was granted a tour of some of the hermit kingdom's
nuclear facilities. Think WikiLeaks is bad? Compared to what the former
director of the Los Alamos lab saw, it's nothing.
Mr. Hecker was given a tour of a construction site where Pyongyang intends
to build a 100-megawatt reactor. Next he was taken to a uranium enrichment
facility. "The first look through the windows of the observation deck into
the two long high-bay areas was stunning," relates Mr. Hecker. "Instead of
seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in
North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand
centrifuges all neatly aligned and plumbed below us."
Nor was that all. Mr. Hecker also writes that "The control room was
astonishingly modern. Unlike the reprocessing facility and reactor control
room, which looked like 1950s U.S. or 1980s Soviet instrumentation, this
control room would fit into any modern American processing facility."
The North Koreans told Mr. Hecker they had developed all of this
indigenously. I asked Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, both former nuclear-
weapons designers and authors of "The Nuclear Express," an excellent history
of nuclear proliferation, what they thought were the chances of that.
Answer: "Zero."
What does this mean? For starters, it means that Pyongyang's nuclear efforts
are not, or not merely, of the what-else-do-you-expect-from-these-nutcases
variety. Some other entity—or regime—has made a considered decision to
actively support the North's efforts to field an ambitious nuclear program.
Messrs. Reed and Stillman have their suspicions. Could it be Iran? Tehran,
Damascus and Pyongyang have such a flourishing trade in nuclear know-how
that it seems a good possibility, Various news outlets have noted the
resemblance of the North's enrichment facility to the Iranian one in Natanz.
But the authors are doubtful. "Not likely," they say. "[The Iranians] can't
even make their own machines work."
What about Pakistan? "A possibility." The nuclear and ballistic missile
trade between Pakistan and North Korea dates to the early 1990s, when
Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan was perfecting his import-export model. Then,
too, the centrifuges Mr. Hecker observed appeared to be of the second-
generation, P-2 variety used by Pakistan.
Global View Columnist Bret Stephens explains why Iran's foreign minister
doesn't want to talk to the US Secretary of State.
Yet the Islamabad-Pyongyang express was shut down years ago, while the North
Korean facility appears to be brand new. It's unlikely that Pakistan would
have been able to supply the large numbers of centrifuges the North has
assembled. And then there's that state-of-the-art control room, probably not
a Pakistani specialty.
Which leaves China, the "most likely" provider of the North's new toys,
according to the authors. "There is no possibility," they say, "of North
Korea achieving what nuclear capability it has without Chinese help."
Mr. Stillman in particular knows whereof he speaks: He was among the first
foreigners ever to visit China's nuclear-test base at Malan. In "The Nuclear
Express," he and Mr. Reed note that beginning in 1982, the Chinese "decided
to actively support nuclear proliferation in the Third World, specifically
the Muslim and Marxist worlds. In the decade that followed, Deng's
government then trained scientists, transferred technology, sold delivery
systems, and built infrastructure in furtherance of that policy."
Why the government of Deng Xiaoping embarked on that very Maoist course
remains a bit of a mystery. Yet embark it did: A.Q. Khan almost certainly
obtained his first bomb blueprint from China, and China may also have been
the site of Pakistan's first nuclear test in May 1990. In 1997, the CIA
testified that "China was the most significant supplier of WMD-related
technology to foreign countries."
In 2002 came news that Chinese experts had worked on Iran's nuclear facility
in Isfahan. That same year, the Washington Times reported that a Chinese
company had sold North Korea 20 tons of tributyl phosphate, a key ingredient
for extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods. And thanks to WikiLeaks, we
know that China facilitates North Korean weapons exports—over insistent U.S
. protests—to sundry foreign destinations.
It's time the U.S. drew appropriate conclusions from this. Every effort to
negotiate with the North has failed. Yesterday, President Obama called Hu
Jintao to ask for help with Pyongyang. But as proliferation expert Henry
Sokolski notes, what's the point of urging Beijing to be part of the
solution when it's so willfully part of the problem? China has signed on to
nearly every nonproliferation agreement around. Yet it continues to flout
all of them.
This is not the behavior of a status quo power, but of a revolutionary one
supporting activities and regimes that represent the most acute threat to
global security. If it continues unchecked, it is China that should be
sanctioned—and the North's facilities destroyed.
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