Why Iran Already Has the Bomb

Bukyanagandi · 2013-02-21T20:49:51+00:00

People watch a TV broadcast reporting North Koreas nuclear test at the Seoul Railway station on Feb. 12, 2013 in Seoul, South Korea. (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images) The White House and President Obamas supporters insist that hes making his first trip to Israel next month to assure the Jewish state that if push comes to shove with Iran, hell have Israels back. But North Koreas nuclear test Tuesday morning could indicate that its already too late for that. If North Korea has the bomb, then for all practical purposes Iran does, too. If thats so, then Obamas policy of prevention has failed, and containmenta policy that the president has repeatedly said is not an optionis in fact all Washington has. If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the history of extensive North Korean-Iranian cooperation on a host of military and defense issues, including ballistic missiles and nuclear development, that dates back to the 1980s. This cooperation includes North Korean sales of technology and arms, like the BM-25, a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching Western Europe; Irans Shahab 3 missile is based on North Koreas Nodong-1 and is able to reach Israel. Iran has a contigent of Iranian weapons engineers and defense officials stationed in North Korea. Meantime, North Korean scientists visit Iran. And last fall, both countries signed a memorandum of understanding regarding scientific, academic, and technological issues. Given all this, theres a great deal of concern that, as one senior U.S. official told the New York Times, the North Koreans are testing for two countries. The classic case of testing for another country is when the United States tested for the U.K. under the 1958 U.S.U.K. Mutual Defense Agreement. The situation with the Hermit Kingdom and the Islamic Republic is different: The North Koreans certainly arent going to make the cooperation quite so explicit, but theyre also not hiding it. In January, Kim Jong-un boasted that the United States was the prime target for Pyongyangs nuclear and missile tests. Earlier this month, Irans Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rejected the idea of nuclear negotiations with the United States. So, neither North Korea nor Iran believe the White House can do much to stop their marchone that they seem to be conducting in lockstep. Nuclear-proliferation experts I spoke with are reluctant to push the conclusion quite that far. Theres no evidence of direct cooperation on nuclear tests, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Monterey Institute, told me. And it would be hard to know, he added, given the paranoid, secretive nature of both regimes. Unless or until the North Koreans or Iranians volunteer that information, it is going to be hard to prove definitively that the North Koreans would give the bombor blueprints for oneto Iran. For North Korea, the incentive to transfer technology, or an actual bomb, in exchange for money, or whatever else the regime needs, is powerful. The only world power capable of discouraging them from proliferating is China, but the Chinese are not going to push much harder than offering stiff rhetoric. The Chinese dont necessarily want North Korea to have a bomb, but what they fear even more is destabilizing their neighbor such that the regime falls, the Korean peninsula is reunited, and they wind up with a pro-American government hosting 50,000 U.S. troops on their border. Beijing prefers to have a buffer. Pyongyangs nuclear program is the crown jewel of the North Korean state enterprise, a carefully guarded secret to which they have given only Iran access. Given how extensively the Iranian nuclear program has been penetrated by foreign intelligence serviceswhich foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi openly admitted in 2010the North Koreans surely understood they were taking an enormous risk by letting Iranians in the door. Whatever theyre getting from Iran in exchangeoil, money, or scientific cooperation on complicated issuesmust be crucial. If Tehran has paid for access to Pyongyangs program, it will also pay for a bomb. At this point, it could be only a matter of haggling over the price. Some of us have been saying this is something to worry about for five or six years, said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C. The North Koreans have been cooperating with Iran for about a decade on nuclear and missile issues, and the Iranians have several full-time weapons engineers on site in North Korea. Neither the North Koreans or the Iranians have made a secret of this. The Iranians were reported at North Koreas last nuclear test as well. Its hard to believe they had no access to the most recent test. North Koreas previous test, its second, in May 2009 yielded an explosion half the size of Tuesdays. The preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization measured Tuesdays test as 5.0 in magnitude, which according to Sokolski is about half the size of the Hiroshima blast. The fact that this is the third test, said Sokolski, is significant. Either the North Koreans want to give the international community a nuclear Bronx cheer, or theyre testing something more advanced than they tested the first two times. If youre trying to improve your technology you dont keep testing the same first generation device over and over again. While details are still unclear, the widespread belief is that the North Koreans tested an enriched uranium device this time, while the first two tests used plutonium. The al-Kibar nuclear site in Syria, which the North Koreans helped designand which the Israelis bombed in 2007was a plutonium facility. Some experts suspect that if the bomb detonated Tuesday was using enriched uranium, this is yet another piece of evidence that Iran is likely using North Korea as a backdoor plan for their own nuclear program. Lewis, who has written about the ties between Iranian and North Korean scientists, agrees that there has definitely been some coordination in the past on numerous defense issues. Last fall North Korea and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding regarding science and technology issues. The North Koreans published a list of officials who signed the document, including the head of Irans atomic energy organization and its defense minister. We should be concerned about them exchanging information, and there are precedents for states passing on designs. The Chinese passed on designs to the Pakistanis who handed them off to the Libyans. Pakistan and Qaddafis Libya are open societies in comparison to Iran and North Korea. The regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran are highly ideological, where major policy decisions are made in a tight circle around the man on topKim Jong-un of North Korea and Ali Khamenei of Iran. Both regimes have made nuclear weapons a vital strategic interest, in spite of sanctions that have sent the Iranian currency plummeting and brought North Korea to the brink of starvation. But sharing nuclear information gives both a way out. North Korea will get billions that Iran will happily pay for a bomb or blueprints. Iran, once in possession of the bomb, will see Europe and perhaps even the United States relax their sanctions regimes in the hopes of getting Iran to the negotiating table by playing nice. If this is the case, Obama will go down in history as the American president who presided over global nuclear proliferation, including rogue regimes. After four years of restraining the Israelis, he may now be going to visit them next month for a good reason: to apologize.

Thread starter Bukyanagandi
Start date Feb 21, 2013

Bukyanagandi

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Feb 21, 2013

Yusomwasha

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Mar 8, 2016

jean phillipe beyun

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Why Iran Already Has the Bomb

Bukyanagandi

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