North Korea Confirms Suspicions About New Nuclear Progress

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today, Monday, November 22, 2010:

North Korea Nuclear Revelation Surprises South - Mark McDonald in The New York Times [link]

• Revelations of a uranium enrichment facility that recently went operational in North Korea apparently caught the South Korean government and nuclear experts here by surprise.
• “Our ministry is watching and monitoring North Korea’s nuclear activity,” said [an official from the South Korean MInistry of Defense], adding that he was not permitted to say whether the military had known if the facility existed before the scientist, Siegfried S. Hecker, revealed the information. Mr. Hecker’s findings were first reported Sunday in The New York Times.
• Several other senior government officials said privately on Monday that they were surprised by the news of the highly sophisticated plant, which Mr. Hecker described in a report as an “industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility with 2,000 centrifuges.” He said the interior of the plant was “stunning” in its sophistication.
• Mr. Hecker, a professor at Stanford University and a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said North Korean officials told him their enrichment facility took 18 months to bring online. Several nuclear experts in Seoul were doubtful that North Korea had managed to build the plant so quickly — and without outside help or equipment.
• “Definitely they had help,” said a senior government official.
• “They could not do this alone,” said Kim Seoc-woo, a proliferation expert and director of the Institute for Peace and Cooperation, a research institute in Seoul. “They must have got their equipment from somewhere. That means, maybe, through China.”

Indefensible - Senator Dianne Feinstein in The L.A. Times [link]

• If Republicans in the Senate succeed in delaying ratification of the New START agreement, it may be months before American inspectors get another look at Russian nuclear weapons.
• No American inspectors have set foot on a Russian nuclear base since [a year ago this week], depriving us of key information about Russian strategic forces.
• Worse, if Republicans in the Senate succeed in delaying ratification of the New START agreement — a distinct possibility — it may be months before American inspectors get another look at Russian nuclear weapons.
• To see what's at stake, consider the Russian missile base at Teykovo. The Russians have upgraded at least one of the four garrisons there this year, replacing the single-warhead SS-25 ICBMs with new SS-27s capable of carrying multiple warheads, according to Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. All without any oversight by American inspectors.
• So it's clear why the New START treaty is strongly supported by our military and national security establishment, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael G. Mullen and numerous current and former commanders of U.S. Strategic Command and its predecessor, the Strategic Air Command.
• The Senate has done its due diligence and is ready for an up-or-down vote on ratification.

Conservatives Split with U.S. Military Leaders Over U.S.-Russia Nuke Treaty - Mary Beth Sheridan in The Washington Post [link]

• An unusual split has opened between conservative Republicans and the American military leadership over the U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty, with current and former generals urging swift passage but politicians expressing far more skepticism.
• Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) "essential to our future security." Retired generals have been so concerned about getting it ratified that some have traveled around the country promoting it. Seven of eight former commanders of U.S. nuclear forces have urged the Senate to approve the treaty.
• But five Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in a recent report that New START was "a bad deal."
• Retired Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson, the former deputy commander of U.S. nuclear forces, said Friday that it was "quite puzzling to me why all of this support [for New START] . . . is ignored. I don't know what that says about the trust that people have and the confidence they have in our military."
• "If you've had experience with this stuff, and a sense of where we've been, how far we've come . . . this is an absolute no-brainer," said retired Adm. William J. "Fox" Fallon, who was head of Central Command and Pacific Command.
• "In the past, I was on active duty when those sorts of things were negotiated," [General Jameson] told reporters. "In the past, I think there was this sense this was a bipartisan effort, there was no concern about ratification."

Ex-Eastern Bloc Nations Tell U.S. Senate to Ratify New START - Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post [link]

• Nations on the front lines of the old Cold War divide made clear here Saturday that they want the Senate to ratify the new U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty, and said that Republican concerns about their well-being were misplaced.
• In an unannounced group appearance at the end of an administration background briefing on Afghanistan, six European foreign ministers took the stage with a message for Congress.
• "Don't stop START before it's started," Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nickolay Mladenov said.
• Some Republican opponents of ratification have suggested that nations once under the Soviet thumb are worried that President Obama has sold out to the Russians with a treaty that could endanger them.
• "My country has a very special experience with Russia, and also a special geographic location," Hungary's Martonyi said. "We advocate ratification of START. It is in the interest of my nation, of Europe and most importantly for the trans-Atlantic alliance."

Jewish Groups Urge START Ratification - Laura Rozen for Politico [link]

• Two major Jewish groups came out Friday in favor of ratification of the START treaty.
• Both the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) cited the importance of passage of the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms reduction treaty in order to maintain American-Russian cooperation in pressuring Iran to curtail its nuclear program.
• "The U.S. diplomatic strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons requires a U.S.-Russia relationship of trust and cooperation," ADL continued. "The severe damage that could be inflicted on that relationship by failing to ratify the treaty would inevitably hamper effective American international leadership to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program."
• The National Jewish Democratic Council, meantime, issued a statement Friday urging citizens to call Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and tell "him to put politics aside, and join the broad bipartisan consensus behind START."
• The pressure from Jewish groups for START ratification citing U.S. national security grounds comes as a coalition of church and other faith groups took out television ad buys urging START ratification in states including Kyl's Arizona, Sen. Bob Corker's Tennessee, and Florida.

NATO Strategic Concept: One Step Forward and a Half Step Back - Hans Kristensen in the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog [link]

• The new Strategic Concept adopted today by NATO represents one step forward and a half step backward for the alliance’s nuclear weapons policy.
• The forward-leaning part of the nuclear policy pledges to actively try to create the conditions for further reducing the number of and reliance on nuclear weapons, recommits to the ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament, and reaffirms that circumstances in which the alliance could contemplate using its nuclear weapons are “extremely remote.”
• But the strategy fails to present any steps that reduce the number of or reliance on nuclear weapons.
• And the formulation in the 1999 Strategic Concept that “NATO’s nuclear forces no longer target any country” is gone from the new document. Instead, it states that NATO “does not consider any country to be its adversary.”
• To be sure, the document still contains what appears to be a commitment to some form of U.S. nuclear presence in Europe, by committing to “the broadest possible participation of Allies in collective defence planning on nuclear roles, in peacetime basing of nuclear forces, and in command, control and consultation arrangements.”
• While seeking to achieve reductions in Russian tactical nuclear weapons is important, formally linking the U.S. deployment in Europe to Russia seems to contradict the policy of the past two decades that the U.S. weapons in Europe are not directed against Russia.
• The changes in the new Strategic Concept are many and important. The language could hint that NATO may be preparing the ground for the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. But the way forward is muddled with preconditions on Russian reductions.

The Lighter Side

Source:  Ann Telnaes for The Washington Post - Click the image to watch!  

Note: Audio accompanies the animation