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The North Korean Nuclear Challenge: Is There a Way Forward?
Amidst bold declarations among the regimes in North Korea and Iran, last week was a bad one for nuclear nonproliferation.
US officials recently briefed Chinese and South Korean officials on information they maintain proves North Korea shipped uranium hexafluoride to Libya.
To mobilize all of the international actors opposing Iranian nuclear development, the U.S. must recognize that Iranian proliferation, Persian Gulf security, the U.S. role in the Middle East, Israel’s nuclear status, and Palestinian-Israeli relations are all linked and cannot be resolved without a more balanced U.S. stance.
We reproduced below an extended excerpt from Senator Carl Levin's speech to the Senate, January 25, 2005. Senator Levin provides a compelling analysis of Secretary Rice's statements on Iraq's weapons capabilities before the Iraq war began.
"Dr. Rice’s record on Iraq gives me great concern. In her public statements she clearly overstated and exaggerated the intelligence concerning Iraq before the war in order to support the President’s decision to initiate military action against Iraq. Since the Iraq effort has run into great difficulty, she has also attempted to revise history as to why we went into Iraq.
…Dr. Rice is not directly responsible for the intelligence failures prior to the Iraq war. The Intelligence Community’s many failures are catalogued in the 500 page report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But she is responsible for her own distortions and exaggerations of the intelligence which was provided to her.
Here are a few of those exaggerations and distortions.
The very first question Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar asked Secretary of State-nominee Condoleezza Rice was on his efforts to streamline and improve the Nunn-Lugar nonproliferation and disarmament programs: "Does the administration support this legislation?" Rice responded enthusiastically, "I really can think of nothing more important than being able to proceed with the safe dismantlement of the Soviet arsenal, with nuclear safeguards to make certain that nuclear weapons facilities and the like are well secured."
Rice also agreed to put accelerating the program on the agenda of the next Bush-Putin meeting, and endorsed the early passage of the Law of the Sea Treaty. We provide, below, a full excerpt of the Lugar-Rice exchange at this hearing, held January 18, 2005, and links to the full hearing transcript.
The official end to the U.S. search for weapons in Iraq confirms what most observers had known for over a year and what UN inspections indicated before the war: Iraq did not have any significant amount of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or long-range missiles. Some old weapons produced before the 1991 war may still be found, but it is clear that the main justification for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not true. As a Carnegie study concluded one year ago, administration officials systematically misled the American people as to the nature of the threat and the need for military action. Saddam Hussein, who had ruled the nation in a brutal dictatorship since 1979, had actively pursued such programs and had produced thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapon agents during the 1980s. The programs were ended and the stockpiles destroyed by the 1991 Gulf War and United Nations disarmament activities that followed.
It is now two years since North Korea withdrew from the Nonproliferation Treaty and since Pyongyang restarted its plutonium production program. The results of efforts by South Korea, China, Japan and particularly the United States have failed to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear program and are now little but an empty shell of a policy. 2005 will be a difficult year.