January 22, 2006
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Honne and Tatemae
David Sanger in today's NYT:
Similar fears [of the aftermath of a pre-emptive strike], he said, gave President Bill Clinton pause about launching a strike on North Korea in 1994. Later that year he reached an accord for a freeze on the North's nuclear production facilities. But in 2003 everything unfroze, and now the North, by C.I.A. estimates, has enough fuel for at least half a dozen bombs.
"Everything unfroze" in 2003? Because they supposedly stopped their Plutonium program but secretly began enriching Uranium instead? And this in an article entitled "Why Not a Strike on Iran?".
Times logic proceeds from the idea that the world all of a sudden became a dangerous place when the current administration took office-or at least picked up from where it was during Bush I. The Clinton years were apparently some sort of Caribbean vacation.
(if the title is inscrutable, click here)
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at January 22, 2006 11:27 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksEveryone says that any president will go to great lengths to prevent being known as the guy on duty while Iran got the bomb. I'm not so sure that's the case though. Look at Clinton, he was the guy on duty when North Korea and Pakistan got the bomb, when India (and Pakistan) started a nuclear arms race. When A.Q. Khan started an international nuclear technology trading post. Yet does anyone remember Clinton as "that guy"? Nope, everybody remembers him more for his intern shenanigans and such-like. It's like some sort of bizarre reverse wag-the-dog effect, but it seems to have worked, for now anyway.
To Jane:
I believe Mr. Sanger is correct to say "everything unfroze" in 2003 in the sense that in very late December 2002, North Korea removed IAEA seals on its spent fuel rods---seals that were there as part of the 1994 Agreed Framework---thus making them available for the processing necessary to extract plutonium from them and thus allowing North Korea to return to its original method of getting the necessary fissile material for a bomb.
Thus, contrary to your statement
"Everything unfroze" in 2003? Because they supposedly stopped their Plutonium program but secretly began enriching Uranium instead?
the North Korean situation did get noteably worse in 2003, at least vis-a-vis the actual technical process of getting fissile material for a bomb. (Admittedly, in the big political picture, i.e., possibly irrational dictator hellbent on getting weapons of mass destruction as soon as possible even as his population starves, the story was the same.)
By "worse vis-a-vis the technical process of getting fissile material," I mean not only that:
A) the start of 2003 as North Korea now had two ways to get fissile material: (1) its previously-covert-but-now-exposed uranium enrichment program to get U-235 and (2) its pre-1994 (and apparently successful) program to extract plutonium from spent fuel its Yongbyang reactor,
but also
B) the plutonium extraction process which became available once again to the North Koreans, quite likely could get them fissile material faster than method (1), their previously covert centerfuge program to enrich uranium.
(Sidenote: Admittedly though, it is harder to make a bomb out plutonium than out of uranium-235. However, it is often claimed---or at least worried---that North Korea already has a working bomb or 2. The material for these bombs, if they do indeed exist, definitely came from the plutonium process and thus would imply North Korea probably has overcome the technical difficulties of building a plutonium bomb. Of course, North Korea hasn't done a full test of its bomb, so who knows?)
To Robin:
Though May 28-30, 1998 will go down in history as the time Pakistan *exploded* its first bombs in nuclear tests (as tit-for-tat for India's open nuclear tests in mid-May 1998), Pakistan likely had working nuclear weapons since at least 1983 (see http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/pakistan/nuke.htm ) and had been exporting uranium enrichment know-how since at least 1991, including to Iran (see the second part of William Langwiesche's series on AQ Khan in this month's issue of The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200601/aq-khan). Questions of whether to sanction Pakistan for its nuclear program go back to at least President Carter, and Presidents since Reagan have felt it necessary to tolerate Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and its proclivity to share prequisite technologies for them due to Pakistan's geopolitical importance. I suppose they can console themselves with the fact that it's a very long road (better part of a decade at least) and a not particularly covert road from getting centrifuge parts and bomb blueprints to actually having a bomb.
Typical presentation by tNYT. "Journalistic Fraud", by Bob Kohn pretty well covers the technique and mindset.
A "reverse wag-the-dog effect"? I'll be pondering the delightfully bizarre sematics of that construction for some time. Thanks, Robin!
Actually, I suspect that Clinton knew exactly what he was doing. Throwing a couple of sexual escapades to the stick-up-their-butts segment of the right wing was the equivalent of a burglar throwing one pork chop to the guard dogs. They got so busy snarling over that they hardly noticed those trivial little pecadillos like selling secrets to the Chinese...
I've often wondered whether, if the cigars and bimbos hadn't proved sufficient distraction, ol' Bill was prepared to get busted smoking pot (but not inhailing of course) in the Oval Office.
"Yet does anyone remember Clinton as "that guy"? Nope, everybody remembers him more for his intern shenanigans and such-like."
Excellent point! I can remember a Chinese dissident at the time commenting that Clinton was lucky that his girlfriends kept distracting everyone from what he was really doing.
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