[radikal]

The Long and Winding Road
What about that? Cheating is cheating, isn’t it? Yes, but the degree matters: A parking ticket and vehicular homicide are both violations of the law. The first gets you a fine, the second a prison term. In the case of North Korea, 20 centrifuges violates the Agreed Framework, but is not a significant military capability. It takes thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium. North Korea would have to spin its 20 machines (if, in fact, it has actually assembled the parts it appears to have bought) for almost two decades in order to make enough material for even one uranium bomb. But secretly constructing an enrichment factory would be a major breach of the agreement, showing an intention to break out of the negotiated freeze at the earliest opportunity. The first can be stopped with little damage; the latter is a fundamental threat.

It now appears this threat never existed. Bush administration officials hyped the threat, just as they had hyped Iraq’s weapons, and earlier, in the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission report, had spun visions of North Korea and Iran building nuclear-tipped missiles by 2003 that could hit the United States.

Don’t Let Me Down
With North Korea now agreeing to refreeze its program and–if all goes as planned–open up its complete program to inspection and eventual dismantlement, some administration officials are now climbing down from past claims. On February 27, 2007, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the status of North Korea’s uranium-enrichment program, Joseph DeTrani, the North Korea coordinator for the director of national intelligence, said that although they still had “high confidence” that some procurement had taken place (read 20 centrifuges), the assessment that North Korea was constructing a plant to pump out dozens of weapons was made at only the “mid- confidence level.” In other words, there was disagreement among the agencies. The tubes may have been for some other purpose (the Iraqi tubes were for rockets, not centrifuges), and there seems to be no hard evidence of plant construction, operation, or enrichment.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin wants to know what’s going on. He sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asking, “Is this still the intelligence community’s assessment?” referring to the 2002 CIA report. “If not, why, and when did the intelligence community revise this assessment? What is the current intelligence community assessment?”

It’s a good question. We need to know what officials knew, when they knew it, and who changed the assessment. We need Congress to conduct an unblinking investigation into the North Korean intelligence that is at least as thorough as the investigations into the rigged Iraqi intelligence. Senator Levin seems to be heading down that road. He also asked for “an unclassified and classified chronology regarding the changes in the Intelligence Community views on North Korean highly enriched uranium capabilities since 2002,” as well as “what was the basis for the assessment that there was an HEU [highly enriched uranium] plant under construction?”
The sooner we get to the bottom of this intelligence scandal, the sooner we can restore credibility to our assessments of foreign weapons programs. Then, we might be able to produce policies that meet real threats, not imagined ones.

Joseph Cirincione is the author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons. He is a senior fellow and director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Center for American Progress.