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North Korea's Nuclear Pledges May Prove Difficult to Verify

Judy Mathewson

Bloomberg

September 29, 2005

Getting North Korea to agree to give up its nuclear weapons may have been the easy part. What comes
next -- making sure it happens -- will be much tougher.

Verifying that dictator Kim Jong Il abides by promises his regime made on Sept. 19 to dismantle an arms program will require an immense effort that may fall short, weapons inspectors and atomic energy experts say. Inspectors will need unfettered access to people, facilities, documents and even soil and water to make sure the communist government isn't making weapons or enriching uranium underground.

"They're very adept at tunneling and camouflaging facilities," said Jon B. Wolfsthal, who lived on a North Korean  nuclear reservation in Yongbyon in 1995 and 1996 as a U.S. Energy Department monitor. Wolfsthal's job was to make sure North Korea was complying with a 1994 disarmament agreement with the Clinton administration, an accord undermined because inspectors couldn't gain access to all research sites.

Nuclear know-how or materials hidden from inspectors could be sold to terrorists, according to U.S. officials. A nuclear-armed North Korea also threatens the security of Japan, South Korea and the 32,500 U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula. Negotiators have yet to determine how to implement the agreement or check it, and whether monitors will come from the United Nations or elsewhere. So far, North Korea has agreed to dismantle its atomic arms, give up its existing nuclear program and rejoin global agreements to halt the spread of such weapons.

Reactors Sought

In return, the U.S. promised not to attack North Korea and affirmed it has no nuclear weapons in South Korea. China, Russia, Japan and South Korea also signed the agreement. The U.S. also agreed to talk "at an appropriate time" about giving the North commercial light-water reactors, though the North Koreans now insist they must have the reactors before disarming.

North Korea should allow in as many as 90 inspectors, said Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. The teams ideally should have experts in physics, chemistry, metallurgy, customs declarations and North Korean history, he said. Inspectors should be allowed to conduct surprise checks, said Terence Taylor, a former UN arms investigator in Iraq who heads the Washington office of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. In Iraq, the UN insisted on using helicopters or spy planes to monitor a site while inspectors were en route by car, to guard against any last-minute trickery, he
said.

Tougher Than Iraq

"In a secretive country like North Korea, it's probably going to be even more difficult to conduct inspections than I can recall from my time in Iraq," Taylor said. Foreigners have almost no access in North Korea outside the capital city, Pyongyang. The government insists upon escorts and usually forbids foreigners to travel by car, said Brian Kremer, a spokesman for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, an international consortium that was building two nuclear reactors for North Korea under the terms of the 1994 agreement.

When former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix visited North Korea in 1992, he said he assumed the North Koreans bugged his hotel room. "I didn't worry," he said in a telephone interview from Sweden. "I had no girlfriends or drugs with me."

A Written History

Before inspectors face such obstacles, they will ask for a written history of the nuclear program, similar to a declaration Iraq was asked to give UN inspectors in 2002, said Kenneth Luongo, the U.S. Energy Department's North Korea specialist during the Clinton administration. The next step will be to check the declaration against what's
already known, experts said. For example, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told the New York Times on Sept. 12 that his country's former chief atomic scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, exported "probably a dozen" centrifuges to North Korea to produce fuel for nuclear weapons.

"If North Korea is forthcoming, they'll say that 'on such-and-such-a-date we accepted centrifuges from such-and-such-a-place,' and the number will have to match up," Wolfsthal said. If North Korea isn't cooperative, spy satellites won't be of much use to check their information. "They know when the satellites are coming," said Gordon Oehler, former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Nonproliferation Agency. North Korean officials have been especially careful to hide things underground since 1993, when satellite pictures caught them burying and camouflaging tanks before a visit by inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Oehler said.

The Next Challenge

Christopher Hill, the U.S. diplomat who negotiated the North Korean agreement, said before leaving the talks in Beijing earlier this month that verification would be the next big challenge. Hill told National Public Radio on Sept. 21 that inspectors would need guidance from the North Korean government. "We can't go on some sort of Easter egg hunt," Hill said. "I mean, it has to involve North Korean cooperation to show us where these facilities are."

Just before the North Koreans expelled UN inspectors in 2002, they covered surveillance cameras and removed seals on equipment, Yousry Abushady said in an account on the IAEA's Web site. Abushady was responsible for making sure that spent nuclear fuel from power plants was not diverted to weapons making.

"Too Sensitive"

The Vienna-based IAEA declined to allow interviews with Abushady or Kaluba Chitumbo, head of the IAEA Safeguards Operation Division for Asia. Agency spokesman Peter Rickwood said the matter was "just too sensitive" at the moment. U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the question of verification "is something that will be addressed in the next round" of negotiations. "Obviously, it's difficult," he said. "But everybody agrees it's a necessary part of the process."

Asked if the U.S. would demand that Americans be part of the verification team, Ereli said, "That's all a subject of
discussion, who it is and what role the IAEA has." North Korea's permanent mission to the UN didn't return
messages seeking comments on verification. Complicating the verification issue is whether North Korea
was or is enriching uranium -- an allegation made by the Bush administration in 2002 that led to the standoff that this month's agreement aims to address. Uranium enrichment is easier to hide than plutonium processing because it can be done in caves or smaller buildings, Wolfsthal and others said.

In 2002, the North Koreans acknowledged they'd been enriching uranium when a U.S. envoy confronted them with evidence of the activity. More recently, the North Koreans have said it is a "sheer fabrication" to say they are engaged in this activity. While Taylor said negotiators should insist on an aggressive inspection regime, he also advised them to keep the details simple. "Negotiating may draw things out and give North Korea a
chance to be difficult and play the other countries off against each other," he said. "Remember, time is on the side of the North Koreans."