Home > Diplomacy Fails to Slow Advance of Nuclear Arms
By DAVID E. SANGER
ENNEBUNKPORT - American intelligence officials and outside nuclear experts have concluded that the Bush administration’s diplomatic efforts with European and Asian allies have barely slowed the nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea over the past year, and that both have made significant progress.
In a tacit acknowledgment that the diplomatic initiatives with European and Asian allies have failed to curtail the programs, senior administration and intelligence officials say they are seeking ways to step up unspecified covert actions intended, in the words of one official, "to disrupt or delay as long as we can" Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
But other experts, including former Clinton administration officials, caution that while covert efforts have been tried in the past, both the Iranian and North Korean programs are increasingly self-sufficient, largely thanks to the aid they received from the network built by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former leader of the Pakistani bomb program. "It’s a much harder thing to accomplish today," said one senior American intelligence official, "than it would have been in the 90’s."
Mr. Khan’s sales have also complicated the Bush administration’s efforts to disarm North Korea. A new assessment of the country has come in one of three classified reports commissioned by the Bush administration earlier this year from the American intelligence community. Circulated last month, the report concluded that nearly 20 months of toughened sanctions, including ending major energy aid, and several rounds of negotiations involving four of North Korea’s neighbors have not slowed the North’s efforts to develop plutonium weapons, and that a separate, parallel program to make weapons from highly enriched uranium was also moving forward, though more slowly.
The desire to pursue a broader strategy against Iran’s nuclear ambitions is driven in part, officials say, by increasingly strong private statements by Israeli officials that they will not tolerate the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and may be forced to consider military action similar to the attack against a nuclear reactor in Iraq two decades ago if Tehran is judged to be on the verge of deploying a weapon. (In contrast, North Korea’s neighbors, especially South Korea and China, are seeking stability first, and disarmament as a longer-term goal, diplomats from the region say.)
"The evidence suggests that Iran is trying to keep all of its options open," said Robert M. Gates, the director of central intelligence under President Bush’s father, who recently headed a detailed study of Iran that was critical of what it called the administration’s failure to engage the country. "They are trying to stay just within their treaty obligations" while producing highly enriched uranium, said Mr. Gates, who is now the president of Texas A&M University, "and I think they can go with a weapon whenever they want to."
Mr. Gates and other outside experts were interviewed on the sidelines of a four-day conference on the challenges of nuclear terrorism and the spread of unconventional weapons held at the Aspen Institute last week. Separately over the past few weeks, five senior officials from the administration and Asian and European nations, all with varying access to the intelligence about the Iranian and North Korean programs, were interviewed about their status. Not surprisingly, their judgments about the progress the two countries have made were not always in accord.
The new report on North Korea, which has circulated among senior American officials and has been described to The New York Times, appears to have been written far more cautiously than the National Intelligence Estimate that erroneously described advanced weapons programs in Iraq. It describes in detail vast gaps in American knowledge. For example, it acknowledges that the whereabouts of North Korea’s stockpile of more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods has been a mystery since early 2003, but also concludes that the North has had plenty of time to reprocess the rods into enough fuel for six to eight additional weapons. Before then, North Korea was judged by the C.I.A. to have one or two weapons developed a decade ago.