[The apparent buildup in nuclear bombs, after 20 years of failed
efforts by the United States to keep North Korea from reaching this point, has
become a rallying call for both sides debating the agreement with Iran.
Republicans and Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
cite the trail of broken agreements with the North as a warning of what they
say will become of the Iran deal. President Obama’s allies turn that argument
on its head: The lesson, they say, is that an enforceable, verifiable deal is
the only way to keep Iran from doing in the next decade what North Korea has
done in the past few years.]
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Satellite
images taken from 2010 to 2012 show construction at the North's main
nuclear
facility. Credit Digital Globe via Google Earth
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SEOUL, South Korea — While the Obama administration
spent the past two years getting within striking distance of a deal to delay
Iran’s race for a nuclear bomb, North
Korea went on an atomic spending spree: an expansion officials
here fear Washington has little hope of stopping.
Satellite photographs of the North’s main nuclear facility at
Yongbyon, released in 2013, have shown a doubling in size of
the nuclear enrichment plant there, which the United States did not know about
until 2010, and American officials strongly suspect there is a second one. A
consensus is emerging that the North most likely possesses a dozen or so nuclear
weapons and could be on the way to an arsenal of as many as 20
by the end of 2016.
“In my view, 20 is a hell of a lot of bombs,” Siegfried S.
Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a professor
at Stanford, said in an interview. But Mr. Hecker, who was the first
American invited to see the
enrichment plant and has made some of the best unclassified estimates
of its future capabilities, said he was doubtful of recent claims by American
military officials that the North was on the verge of shrinking a nuclear
weapon to fit on a long-range missile capable of hitting the western United
States.
The apparent buildup in nuclear bombs, after 20 years of failed
efforts by the United States to keep North Korea from reaching this point, has
become a rallying call for both sides debating the agreement with Iran.
Republicans and Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
cite the trail of broken agreements with the North as a warning of what they
say will become of the Iran deal. President Obama’s allies turn that argument
on its head: The lesson, they say, is that an enforceable, verifiable deal is
the only way to keep Iran from doing in the next decade what North Korea has
done in the past few years.
Both sides are, of course, selectively plucking arguments to
support their case. The reality is that the Iranian and North Korean programs,
while often referred to in the same breath by politicians, are so different
that all the analogies are flawed.
For starters, no agreement with North Korea was ever as specific
as theproposed Iran accord,
which Congress is moving to review after a billcleared the Senate on
Thursday. The Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea in
1994 was a few pages long, compared with the hundreds of pages and annexes in
the Iran deal.
In addition, Iran says it will abide by the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, which provides a legal underpinning for the final deal
that is supposed to be sealed by June 30. In contrast, North Korea boasts that
its atomic arsenal is enshrined in its Constitution, and it withdrew from the
treaty long ago. (The club of nuclear nations that have not signed the treaty is
a small one: India, Israel and Pakistan. All are believed to have 100 to 200
weapons, and many suspect that range is the ultimate goal of North Korea’s
leader, Kim Jong-un.)
Inspectors have regular access to Iran’s major nuclear sites,
although they have been stonewalled on some details of alleged work on past
weapons designs. The deal includes provisions for monitoring equipment in every
known facility and requirements that Iran dilute its stockpiles of
weapons-grade fuel or ship them out of the country. In contrast, there have
been no inspectors in North Korea for years.
Not least, Iran’s leadership is under domestic political
pressure to end sanctions and normalize relations with the West, but North
Korea sees near-total isolation as the key to its survival.
American strategy has also gone in opposite directions. Mr.
Obama made overtures to North Korea during his first months in office, but his
view quickly changed when the country responded by conducting a nuclear test.
He and his advisers decided that Iran was the far better strategic bet: With
luck, it could be stopped from building weapons.
North Korea’s arsenal, one of Mr. Obama’s top Asia aides said,
“is already in the rearview mirror.” The administration began discussing
“strategic patience,” which essentially meant continuing pressure through
sanctions and other levers until North Korea decided to negotiate.
But the North says the prospect of disarmament is long past. It
wants what amounts to arms control negotiations that acknowledge it as a nuclear
power — which the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, says it
will never accept.
Behind the scenes, Sydney A. Seiler, the State Department’s
coordinator for eliminating North Korea’s nuclear program, and his counterparts from
China, Japan, Russia and South
Korea have been putting together a package of proposals to show
to the North that would find a basis for resuming negotiations. Several
officials involved described a package that sounds, in broad strokes, a lot
like the secret diplomacy that preceded the negotiations with Iran: a freeze on
all current production so that the North’s arsenal would not be expanding as
negotiations resumed.
But in interviews in Seoul, senior South Korean officials said
they were concerned that the events of the past two years, while the United
States was focused on Iran, had left them with a far more complex situation.
“Some in my government feel that we may now face the point of no return on the
North’s nuclear technology and their missile capability,” one official said.
“The point of no return” is a phrase the Israelis used to use about Iran,
fearing that its program was too large to ever contain.
The concern about the North’s nuclear expansion is not that it
would launch a pre-emptive strike on South Korea or Japan, because North Korean
officials know their government would be decimated in minutes or hours. But
South Korean and American strategists are worried that a stockpile of 20
weapons, and perhaps 50 or more by 2020, could give the country enough extra
supply to sell highly enriched uranium, much as it has sold missile and other
technology to Iran, Pakistan and Syria.
“It would be an enormously risky thing for them to do,” one
senior American military official here said. “But we’ve seen them take other
very risky actions in the past,” including building a reactor in Syria, which
Israeldestroyed in
an airstrike in 2007.
Apart from the destruction of the reactor itself, the North
suffered little for that action, and the sanctions placed on it in
January in retaliation for the cyberattack on Sony Pictures, for which Mr. Obama said North
Korea was responsible, have been viewed as largely ineffective.
Some American officials say they have one last hope: If the deal
with Iran works and sanctions are lifted, North Korean officials, who are
following the negotiations closely, might conclude that their nuclear program
could be traded for economic integration. Other senior American officials say
that is a pipe dream.
“For Iran, some degree of integration is part of how you build
national power,” one of those officials said. But for North Korea, he added,
“it’s the pathway to disintegration.”
