• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 704 0

used this method with Taiwan in the 1980s. Some other nations—for reasons of their own—decided to abandon nuclear programs. Japan and Sweden chose not to develop programs. Argentina and Brazil agreed bilaterally to abandon their fledging efforts. The white South African government gave up its nuclear weapons and its capabilities on the eve of the black majority’s advent to power. Libya’s admission in 2003 that it had a range of covert WMD programs that it had formerly denied was largely a result of two factors: successful HUMINT that caught shipments going to Libya and Libya’s concerns about potential U.S. actions after the invasion of Iraq. The Libya case was an intelligence and policy success but not a result of diplomacy. Many other states—Iran, Israel, and North Korea—remain unconvinced by U.S. diplomacy. Given the minimal success of moral suasion, some people have argued that the only workable solution is an active nonproliferation policy—intervening to destroy the capability, as both Israel and the 1991 Persian GulfWar allies did with Iraq. (See box, “Iraq’s Nuclear Program: A Cautionary Tale.”)

The September 2007 Israeli air strike against a presumed nuclear site in Syria underscores these concerns as well as the inherent ambiguities involved. After the raid, Syria denied that it had occurred, although subsequent commercial imagery revealed considerable Syrian efforts to both clean up and mask the site by extensive bulldozing. In April 2008, the United States released its conclusion that North Korea had been assisting Syria in building a plutonium processing plant, and not a peaceful nuclear use plant, at the site. There are several issues at play in this incident. First, if it was a nuclear site, then once again there is the circumstance of unilateral military action being taken as a means of ensuring that the program will be stopped. Second, if there was North Korean assistance to Syria, does this indicate a possible violation of North Korea’s agreement with the United States (and China, Russia, and Japan) to cease nuclear weapons activity or, at a minimum, an effort to circumvent that agreement by exporting part of its program? Third, it raises the specter of yet another clandestine nuclear relationship to be tracked.

IRAQ’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM: A CAUTIONARY TALE

During the 1980s, Iraq was one of the nations whose nuclear weapons program was closely watched by U.S. experts. The existence of a program was not in question; its status was.

On the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the considered analytical judgment, according to subsequent accounts, was that Iraq was at least five years away from a nuclear capability. After Iraq’s defeat in the war, analysts learned that Iraq had been much closer to success, even though Israel had attacked and destroyed some of its facilities some years earlier

What had gone wrong with U.S. estimates?

Iraq was a closed target, one of the most repressive and heavily policed states in the world. The state’s nature makes collection more difficult, but that is not the answer to the question.

The answer lies in an analytical flaw, namely, mirror imaging To manufacture the fissionable material it required, Iraq chose a method abandoned by the United States in the early days of its own nuclear program after World War II The method works, but it is a very slow and tedious way to produce fissionable material.

For Iraq, however, it was the perfect method, not because it was slow, but because foreign analysts disregarded it. The method allowed Iraq to procure materials that were more difficult to associate with a nuclear weapons program, to mask its status. A program of this sort was also more difficult for Western analysts to spot because they largely dismissed the approach out of hand, assuming that Iraq would want—just as the United States and others had—to find the fastest way to produce fissionable material.

In the course of U.S. military action in Iraq that commenced in 2003, expected Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs were not found Some wondered if analysts had compensated