Talking with our Enemies?

The latest on the appeasement front:

President Bush has authorized the most significant American diplomatic contact with Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, sending the State Department's third-ranking official to Geneva for a meeting this weekend on Iran's nuclear program, administration officials said Tuesday.

....William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, will attend a meeting on Saturday with the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement on Wednesday.

It has to be admitted that Obama is right on this issue. Our foreign policy successes (if you can call them that after the failures that precede them) have all come as a result of talking with out enemies. Our foreign policy failures have all come as a result of stubbornly refusing to talk to our enemies. For instance, during the period when we weren't talking to North Korea, they manufactured their first dozen nuclear bombs and developed enrichment technologies that they then spread around the world. Now that we are talking to them, they have suspended their program and destroyed their reprocessing facility.

Once again, the Bush Administration is doing things that McCain has called Obama "naive" for advocating.

Olmert the Oil Speculator

As far as I can find, he hasn't been repudiated by the Israeli government for this comment:

"If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective," Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

And oil spikes. It had been down to $125ish, but with that little splash it spiked to $138.

By depressing contrast, when Saudi Arabia proposed pumping another 500,000 bpd, the market yawned. This is something to keep in mind while the Republicans are pushing to make us "energy independent" by pumping another 300,000 bpd from the Coastal Shelf.

Bush Gave the Norks Nukes, pt II

(Pt. 1 here) File this under Unbelievable:

"From our investigations it is apparent that ... the Bank did not introduce counterfeit U.S. currency notes into circulation," the Ernst & Young audit said, noting that large cash deposits from North Korea were routinely screened for counterfeits by the Hong Kong branch of an unidentified bank with U.S. operations.

The audit's conclusions about the laundering of counterfeit currency are significant because they cast doubt on Bush administration claims that North Korea has engaged in state-sponsored counterfeiting and introducing these fake bills via Banco Delta.

What's the most important national security goal America has? To stifle the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a bulwark against the day when a bomb will go off in one of our cities. Well, in this case we had come to an agreement for exactly that - the much ballyhooed September 19 2005 Agreement, wherein the North Koreans would return to the requirements of the Non Proliferation Treaty. The day after announcing that agreement, a different division of the US Government accused the North Koreans of counterfeiting billions of dollars and being a "criminal state." They froze the Nork's international accounts - quite the blow for an already poverty-stricken nation - driving the Norks from the agreement, and guaranteeing that this "terrorist madman" acquire a half-dozen nuclear weapons.

That, of course, is the charitable interpretation. There's an increasing chance that this counterfeited blow-up was manufactured for the express purpose of derailing progress, as part of a "spread the chaos" grand strategy. This cynicism is supported by the fact that this is an exact repeat of the uranium enrichment fabrication that destroyed Clinton's Agreed Framework in the first place. The failure of Bush's policy could not be more clearly demonstrated. It begins to amount to a dereliction.

North Korea's Nonexistent Uranium

What is the preeminent goal of our national security policy? Nuclear Nonproliferation, right? Everyone talks about it in the debates and on TV shows, and these are serious people, mind you, so I'm sure their actions will be in line with their rhetoric about this most serious of all topics - national security. Hold your breath with me...

Clinton's Agreed Framework achieved an excellent victory in the battle to decrease the ultimate security threat we face - that of loose nukes in the hands of incredibly hostile regimes. Through an agreement that was essentially a bribe, we achieved our goal of completely stopping the enrichment of plutonium inside North Korea. We stopped the North Koreans from making nuclear weapons with the Agreed Framework - an achievement to be celebrated.

Instead, it was alleged by the Bush Administration that the North Koreans were cheating on the agreement by enriching uranium - much more difficult to manufacture a bomb with - and using that uranium for a clandestine program. Incensed that America would be taken in by this "thug," the Bush Administration pulled out of the Agreed Framework entirely, rather than trying to ratchet this uranium program into the existing framework. The rest (including the half-dozen nuclear weapons the North Koreans now possesses) is history.

Now we find out that the straw that broke the camel's back wasn't even a real straw. From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed.

....The administration's stance today stands in sharp contrast to the certainty expressed by top officials in 2002, when the administration accused Pyongyang of running a secret uranium program -- and demanded it be dismantled at once.

Or from the NY Times:

For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.

But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.

“The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizable arsenal if this had been handled differently,” a senior administration official said this week.

"The Question now is whether we would be in" a better position now if we had followed a sane policy not based on machismo, but on pursuing the desired results. Heaven help me, what a question.

The Blogosphere has been all over this one. This revelation catapults this failure from disqualifying to intentional. We weren't even sure about the uranium program, so we let them open the plutonium program again for no reason! Given how much greater a threat a plutonium program is than a uranium, this is an absolutely unbelievable mistake. In no way could such a trade-off ever make sense.

North Korea Wins?

So we've achieved a deal with the North Koreans addressing their nuclear program, eh? I wonder where 6 years of our President's steely resolve have gotten us...

The deal is simple: We give North Korea massive energy supplies in the form of heavy fuel oil and they suspend all nuclear activities - even "peaceful" civilian energy initiatives. The Bush Administration is eager to emphasize the fact that all nuclear activities are suspended, not even allowing light water reactors, even though they pose no military threat whatsoever. This meaningless restriction is meant to be the defining difference between this agreement and the Clinton Administration's Agreed Framework, showing that the hard nosed hawkishness of our President Bush has paid dividends. If you ignore this hogwash, the deal is essentially Clinton's Agreed Framework - a gain of nothing after 6 years of inaction.

On the other side of the scale, of course, is the new existence of around a dozen nuclear weapons in the hands of the North Korean government, a "terrorist state." Weigh that against light water reactors and come to your own conclusion about whether this is a victory or defeat for George W. Bush's America.

Predictably, Tony Snow received the following question during the White House press briefing:

There seems to be some conservative push back, I guess, about the North Korea deal. Wall Street Journal editorial page called it the "faith-based nonproliferation." What's your sense about that?

The conservative push back was lead by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, of all people:

Bolton said the accord "contradicts the President's policy" of past years.

Further, he said the deal sends a "terrible signal to would-be proliferators," and "for a variety of reason I hope we are able to rethink this."

His criticism, and that from other conservatives is essentially a reaction against Clintonism. We've allowed the North Koreans to build a dozen plutonium-based weapons, and we're dealing with it by going back to the same bribe that Bill Clinton thought was the appropriate response. Needless to say, acknowledgements that Clinton was right incense conservatives. They spout the "critics-just-hate-George-W-Bush" rhetoric so fluently because of the animus in their heart towards Clinton.

Looking back at my jotted working title, I have a thought: Am I "blaming America first" here? Am I delighting in our abject failure? Of course not. What has happened with our North Korean policy has made me and my family less safe. I would never root for such an outcome, but it illustrates nicely the depths of incompetence dominating our times.

Bush Flips on North Korea

From today's Times:

The United States has offered a detailed package of economic and energy assistance in exchange for North Korea’s giving up nuclear weapons and technology, American officials said Tuesday.

This is rank, Clintonian appeasement! I thought my President was steadfast in his steely resolve to never be wrong about anything? Go figure.

Of course, this does mean that we're back to the policy Clinton established and Bush dropped - paying off the North Koreans to abandon their program. Those of us in the real world always knew this particular problem would be solved with a bribe, since the neoconservatives' other always-ready option - blowing stuff up - isn't exactly operative on China's doorstep. Of course, we did gain something in exchange for our President's Axis-of-Evil Policy - a nuclear armed North Korea! Good trade.

via Josh Marshall.

White House Released Nuclear Weapons Secrets

Years ago I would have said that it must be April Fool's day in the NYTimes' office. I'd have thought to myself, "surely, no American government would be so craven as to put political considerations above nuclear proliferation." Unfortunately for me and the rest of the country, it's been a long time since I've been really shocked by the Bush Administration's blinding, radioactive incompetence. This, though, is one of those things that you couldn't sell to a movie audience: the U.S. Government releasing advanced nuclear weapons making secrets in order to cover its ass for the last colossal screw-up:

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr. Schulte about the Web site.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”

You'll remember that the reason they released these documents was to allow the distributed power of the internet (ed. read right-blogistan) to sift through the information - hopefully finding some smoking gun along the way that proves that Saddam was making weapons of mass destruction. So, in order to prove that we stopped WMDs, we released WMDs. IT'S A MASTER STROKE!!

Incidentally, once you have weapons-grade radioactive material, these equations and diagrams are some of the few things standing between you and a sophisticated bomb - much more efficient than the nuclear weapon any 5th grader could make with a critical mass. I wonder... who in the neighborhood might want that sort of information? God knows how much time and money this shaves off Iran's development time.

Unbelievable.

Sanctions on Iran

So, Russia appears to be rejecting our proposal for sanctions on Iran for continuing their enrichment activities. This was obvious enough that even I could predict it. In the Iranian's defense, they aren't doing anything that violates their international obligations. They're playing by the rules. We just don't like it, for good reason.

Russia on Thursday rejected a draft UN resolution put forward by European powers targeting Iran's nuclear programme, saying the proposed measures did not advance objectives agreed on earlier by major world powers.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the resolution put forward on Wednesday by Britain, France and Germany would not be effective in containing Iran's programme and contradicted the consensus reached by the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany.

"I think that in this respect the draft resolution that has been presented clearly does not further the objectives that the six powers agreed on earlier," Lavrov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Those goals, Lavrov said, are preventing proliferation of sensitive technology without the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, while also keeping open all necessary channels of communication with Iran.

The foreign ministry's deputy head, Sergei Kislyak, said separately that Russia was "carefully studying" the draft resolution. However, a "long negotiating process is required" to find a mutually acceptable decision, he was quoted as saying by Interfax.

Since they didn't take our incentive package just to make us feel better about ourselves, their enrichment activities must be continuing apace. From our perspective this will only get worse, but as long as Iran plays by the rules, we will be hard pressed to gather a coalition to enact harsh sanctions, or confront them militarily. We just don't have the legitimacy.

The History of the Nork's Nukes

This, from Obsidian Wings, is the best, most comprehensive view of the North Korea problem I've yet read. Check it out if you want a full history, from the late 1980's onwards.

Bush's Presser on North Korean Nukes

I'm watching Bush's press conference, and amongst the many interesting topics, the North Korean nuclear test deserves the most play. In defense of his patented "Stand By and Do Nothing while the Norks get Nukes" strategy, he keeps referencing the September 2005 "Joint Statement" Agreement which the "North Korean's abandoned."

And frankly I was quite optimistic that we had succeeded last September when we had this joint statement which... you [in the press] adequately covered. And yet he walked away from it. He decided well maybe his word doesn't mean anything.

But Bush only pays attention to Article 1 of the September Agreement. No heed is paid to Article 2, which stipulates nonaggression against the North Korean regime, food and economic aid, and an increased normalization of relations between the US, Japan, and North Korea. Needless to say, by declaring North Korea a criminal regime and instituting sanctions, only 2 months after the agreement was signed, North Korea feels that America violated this Second Accord - before the North Korean's broke Article 1 by continuing their nuclear program. They have a legitimate claim that we violated that agreement, giving them rhetorical cover for this obvious act of provocation. It is one more instance that illustrates this Administration's constant attempt to steer situation towards crisis and conflagration. A wise strategy, indeed, since within every crisis is "opportunity." Excuse me while I gag on the cliche. How much of Bush's "opportunity" can the world take?

He also reiterates that he considers "all options available" to him in response to questions about the possible use of military force. Please. There is no prospect for military action against North Korea. We are not in the business of starting fights we know we will lose. Plus, with air power - the only option even the most feverish of war supporters consider - what do we hit? What target? The last time the North's nuclear stockpile was in one place was back when they gave us the bird in 2003.

Ha! President Bush just said, "We don't shift our goals." Yes... even when Iran and North Korea march their programs forward, were warned again and again that there is a red line they cannot cross, our goals do no shift. The remaining members of the Axis of Evil were warned that pursuing nuclear weapons "was unacceptable to America." Yet, have they slowed? Have there been the dire consequences for their actions that our leaders have threatened? How is the current round of rhetoric any different than the others? Why should their fear it? Line after line has been crossed, and we are entirely powerless to put bite to our bark.

We look like impotent fools, thanks to Bush's failed policy. But then again, at least we aren't trying to "negotiate with evil"... we're just letting "evil" walk all over us.

The Nork's Nukes and Clinton's Agreed Framework

Condi Rice... what a dishonest woman.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday defended the Bush administration's refusal to hold bilateral talks with North Korea in the face of Pyongyang's claim of a successful nuclear test. She told CNN the Clinton administration tried that approach in the 1990s and it had failed.

Josh Marshall:

"Failure" =1994-2002 -- Era of Clinton 'Agreed Framework': No plutonium production. All existing plutonium under international inspection. No bomb.

"Success" = 2002-2006 -- Bush Policy Era: Active plutonium production. No international inspections of plutonium stocks. Nuclear warhead detonated.

Face it. They ditched an imperfect but working policy. They replaced it with nothing. Now North Korea is a nuclear state.

Facts hurt. So do nukes.

North Korea's Fizzle

This shouldn't be too much of a surprise for a first test, but it is embarrassing for the Norks all the same:

France increased its estimate of the blast Monday in North Korea to 1 kiloton or less, but experts still have not confirmed that the explosion was nuclear.

Xavier Clement of France's Atomic Energy Commission estimated the blast at "about or less than a kiloton."

And, should you scoff at the Frenchyness of my sourcing, Jane's Weekly must be right up your alley:

Although details are tentative, initial and unconfirmed South Korean reports indicate that the test was a fission device with a yield of .55 kT. By comparison the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima yielded approximately 12.5 kT. The figure of .55 kT, however, seems too low given the 4.2 register on the Richter scale. This could suggest - depending upon the geological make-up of the test site - a yield of 2-12 kT. If, however, the lower yield is correct, it would suggest that the test had been a "pre- or post-detonation" event (ie a failure), as it had been anticipated that North Korea's first nuclear test would have a significantly higher yield.

.55 kT? That's a small explosion. There have been non-nuclear explosions as big as 2-5 kilotons, I believe. So, either the North Korean scientists are quite skilled in their enrichment process and lens shaping, or the weapon fizzled. They may have achieved a limited fission event, but if it went off without a hitch they should have hit around 10 kilotons.

If it were a full, to-spec fission explosion, then the amount of nuclear material used would be much lower than is usual for a first attempt. The less fissile material, the tighter a space you have to compress it into in order to achieve a critical mass, and thereby a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Compressing the fissile material is accomplished by first creating a very homogeneous and precise starting sphere, then compressing it quickly and evenly from all sides with high explosives - the exact kind stolen from the Al Qaqaa weapons facilities in Iraq after the invasion, in fact. There is very little chance the North Koreans are skilled enough to achieve such a feat on their first attempt.

Bush's North Korea Failure

From the 2002 State of the Union:

Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. . . .

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. . . .

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.

And yet, "stand[ing] by as peril draws closer and closer" is exactly what President Bush has done. Now we live in a world with a nuclear armed North Korea, and we have President Bush to thank.

Via Glenn Greenwald:

Independent of all of that, we have plainly created an incentive system where every rational leader -- not crazed, Hitleresque, world-domination-seeking leaders -- but every rational leader, would assess that it is in his country's interest to acquire a nuclear capability. Of the three "axis of evil" members, the one which was, by far, the weakest militarily was the one we invaded and shattered. But with the strongest of the three, North Korea, we have proceeded very gingerly, issuing plainly empty threats and bellicose rhetoric but doing little else.

The message we have sent with our foreign policy is clear -- if you are a militarily weak nation, we may invade you or bomb you at will, but if you arm yourselves or, better still, acquire nuclear capability, we will not. That has become the incentive scheme produced by having the world's only superpower announce to the world that it has the right to preemptively invade other countries.

I have been saying that for years. Go read the whole thing... it's only ten paragraphs or so.

North Korea's Nuclear Test

"I love the Financial Times. The financial papers actually tell the truth." That's one of Chomsky's common refrains. It makes sense, since, if you're making decisions that will make or lose money, you need to be dealing with the most faithful representation of reality you can come by.

Here, the Financial Times tells it like it is:

North Korea's probable test of a nuclear weapon on Monday has triggered the second nuclear crisis in 13 years on the Korean peninsula.

In 1993, North Korea announced it would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, leaving it free to divert nuclear material from its energy reactors to make a nuclear weapon and setting off a round of crisis diplomacy led by the Clinton administration. The result was the so-called agreed framework, which - in return for supplies of fuel oil to North Korea - froze most aspects of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programme for the rest of the decade.

The agreed framework was in effect consigned to history when the Bush administration came to power in 2001. The new administration argued that although the road to a plutonium-based nuclear bomb had been frozen, the North Koreans were cheating by attempting to develop a uranium-based bomb that was not explicitly addressed by the agreement.

That five years later, North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon will be widely interpreted as a sign of the failure of the tougher approach favoured by the Bush team.

North Korea told the Security Council that it tested a weapon over the weekend. It must have been an underground test, which means every advanced nation on the earth heard the rumble. It's not exactly a claim the North Koreans can fake.

Nuclear Response

Atrios wonders what would be the correct response to nuclear terrorism against an American city. I think the answer is self-evident: we have a nuclear deterrent for a reason. If we are unwilling to use that force to respond to an attack on one of our cities, what good is it? Would our silo's silence not destroy any deterrent value our ICBM fleet carries? Our response should be to quickly determine the point of manufacture and launch massive retaliation.

Of course, nothing involving the killing of millions is ever that simple. The science behind this is not nearly as easy as the "nuclear fingerprint" nomenclature implies. Attribution Technology, it is called, and it is still an imperfect science. There are certain sources that have particularly distinctive characteristics, but an attack might well remain anonymous if we are doubly unlucky.

To engage in some cynicism: What are the odds that because of political pressure we would declare a source when the science wasn't certain? I hope we would show the moral restraint, but we have a government of men, and I fear their weakness before the rage of the American people.

In reality our nuclear deterrent has always been a psychological one, since the use of even a fraction of the world-wide arsenal would bear enormous implications for the planet's habitability. So, because terrorists would deliver the bomb via a non-ballistic method (i.e. no easy-to-read return address), our deterrent needs to change shape. Perhaps a world-wide public information campaign along the lines of "We have the technology to tell for sure where a bomb was made, and that country will be committing national suicide if one of its bombs is used in an attack." Even for a group like Al-Qaeda to whom friendly civilian deaths are a strategic victory, the potential genocide of their people must still be a deterrent... right?