China Intends to Push North Korea for Cooperation with Nuclear Talks

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

Stories we're following today: Thursday February 24, 2011

China to Press For North Korea Nuclear Talks - Global Security Newswire [link]

• China intends to push for restarting the long-stalled six-nation negotiations aimed at shuttering North Korea's nuclear program, Beijing's top diplomat said [Wednesday].
• Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi offered his comments ahead of a meeting in Seoul with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Sung-hwan, Agence France-Presse reported. Beijing wants the nuclear talks to begin soon "to realize denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and normalization of relations between related countries," Yang said.
• China hosts the talks, which also involve Japan, Russia, the United States and both Koreas. The diplomatic aid-for-denuclearization effort over several years made some progress in closing North Korea's atomic operations. However, the talks were last held in December 2008; Pyongyang has since conducted its second nuclear test and unveiled a previously secret uranium enrichment plant. It is also suspected of sinking a South Korean warship last March and in November shelled the South's Yeonpyeong Island.
• The six-party talks are the correct venue for discussing the enrichment matter, according to Beijing. Seoul, Tokyo and Washington, though, have indicated that the negotiations can resume only when North Korea demonstrates sincerity on the nuclear issue and improves relations with its neighbor.

Nuclear Madness in Tripoli - Jeremy Bernstein for The New York Review of Books [link]

• Almost from the moment he assumed power in 1969, Qaddafi was interested in acquiring nuclear weapons. He tried to buy them from China; and when that failed he tried to build them himself. In the 1990s he bought an entire turnkey nuclear weapons program from the Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan.  It is believed he gave up the entire program in 2003 in a grand bargain with the United States that eventually restored Libya’s diplomatic status and allowed US companies to do business with the oil-rich country.
• There remained and still remains a nuclear research program centered in Tajura, about ten miles east of Tripoli. The centerpiece of the program is a relatively small research reactor built in 1979 by the Russians, who also supplied the fuel.  However there is a special feature of this reactor that needs comment: it is fueled by highly enriched uranium—apparently an 80 percent enrichment of uranium 235.
• At 80 percent enrichment it would be adequate for use in at least a crude nuclear device. In the Libyan case, the amount of enriched uranium used in the reactor is less than what would be necessary for a weapon. But having this much possible bomb fuel in a country like Libya is not desirable.
• The Russians seem to have understood this and established a program to remove the spent fuel from Tajoura and fly it back to Russia. The Russian plane left Tripoli on December 21, 2009, with the uranium. For the moment, the Tajoura reactor remains in the part of the country still controlled by forces loyal to Qaddafi, who has vowed to “fight to the last drop of blood” to remain in power. Its current status is unknown.

Kim's Hungry Regime - Wall Street Journal [link]

• It's been a hard winter in North Korea, and the Kim family regime is once again struggling to feed its people. So the usual cycle has recommenced: The regime has put out the begging bowl, NGOs are painting a grim picture, the World Food Program has launched an "assessment," and the United States is insisting that any effort must first be based on better oversight and monitoring, so the food aid gets to the people who need it.
• Kudos to State's top Asia official, Kurt Campbell, and spokesman P.J. Crowley for breaking diplomatic habit and refusing to write the Kim Jong Il regime one more blank food check. The Bush Administration usually folded.
• Denying food aid is admittedly tough to sustain, given the hardships facing the North Korean people...Yet it is highly unlikely that such aid will reach the neediest North Koreans. Instead Kim will use it to buy off his military and party comrades directly, or let them cash in by serving as middle men.
• Any other policy will do nothing more than help the Kim regime retain power and continue to threaten the world with nuclear weapons. The suffering of the North Korean people will not be relieved by providing them with subsistence rations in the prison that is their country.

Pentagon Looks to Africa for Next Bio Threat - Spencer Ackerman for "Danger Room" [link]

• The Pentagon agency charged with protecting the United States from weapons of mass destruction is looking to the insecure storage of pathogens at clinics in Africa as the next flashing red light for a potential biological outbreak.
• Kenneth Myers, the director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), joined his old boss, Sen. Richard Lugar, on a trip to Burundi, Kenya and Uganda last fall to check out the security of disease samples at local clinics. What they found disturbed them: strains of deadly viruses like foot-and-mouth disease and anthrax, available at numerous clinics in areas in or near conflict zones, potentially ripe for the terrorist taking.
• “It’s important to remember that these countries have no intention of being threats to the United States,” Myers tells Danger Room. Indeed, the clinics have a very good reason for housing the pathogen samples: Their doctors need to be able to match patients with known diseases in the event of an outbreak. But Myers and Lugar left their trip worried about how many clinics possess the pathogens, as 20 years’ worth of lessons from checking the spread of loose nukes raised fears of inadvertent bio-proliferation.
• So the DTRA is looking to expand a program that’s grown out of Lugar’s eponymous anti-nuclear proliferation effort into Africa to see if the U.S. can help partner with these countries to minimize the threat.

Israel to Europe: Iran Ships Augur Nuclear Spread - Reuters [link]

• Iran's dispatch of two navy ships to the Mediterranean Sea should serve as a warning to Europe about the nuclear proliferation risk posed by Tehran, Israeli President Shimon Peres said on Wednesday.  Israel has voiced discomfort at the arrival of the Iranian frigate and support vessel, which passed through the Suez Canal en route to Syria on Tuesday in the Islamic republic's first military use of the strategic waterway in Egypt.
• "This is a cheap provocation by Iran. The passage of the ships does not in itself present a threat on our region, but the real threat, clear as a warning light, is to Europe and the entire world," Peres said in a speech during a visit to Spain.  "Iran is developing nuclear weaponry ... and when nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terror groups, or Iranian proxies, European capitals will be under an existential threat," he said, according to a transcript provided by his office.
• Speaking to reporters in Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy's diplomatic adviser said that given it was the first time Iranian naval ships had crossed the canal and entered the Mediterranean since the 1979 Islamic revolution, it could not be considered a "harmless" event.

South Korea's Nuclear Envoy Heads to US - Agence France-Presse [link]

• South Korea's nuclear envoy left Thursday for talks in Washington on North Korea's uranium enrichment activities, after China blocked publication of a United Nations report criticising the programme.The programme disclosed last November potentially gives the North a second way to make nuclear weapons, in addition to its plutonium stockpile.
• Envoy Wi Sung-Lac told reporters his trip would focus on how to cope with the uranium programme in the context of the Security Council [and] ways to create the right conditions for resuming long-stalled six-party talks on the North's nuclear disarmament.
• On Wednesday the North's ally China refused to let the UN Security Council publish a report on the North's nuclear sanctions-busting, diplomats said.  The sanctions panel report calls for tougher implementation of the measures and outlines the progress the North has made on uranium enrichment, according to diplomats.  It describes the enrichment as a new violation of sanctions imposed following atomic tests in 2006 and 2009.
• China chairs the six-party talks last held in December 2008 and has been trying to revive them to ease overall tensions on the Korean peninsula. It says the uranium issue should be dealt with at that forum.  Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi called for an early resumption of the talks during his two-day visit to Seoul that began on Wednesday.  South Korean President Lee Myung-bak described Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions as a threat to regional peace and to the world's non-proliferation regime.