Copyright 2003 New Republic, Inc.
The New Republic
March 24, 2003
President Bush caused barely a ripple on March 3 when he apparently shifted America's North Korea policy, remarking to reporters that if America's efforts "don't work diplomatically, they'll have to work militarily." And Bush's words may signify a broader shift: As the Korean crisis has escalated, more and more analysts--including some in the Bush administration--have begun arguing that a U.S. strike on North Korean nuclear targets may be worth the risk.
Many of these analysts believe the United States can strike without prompting a broader war, and they predict that the risks of lethal nuclear fallout from such a precision attack on North Korea's known nuclear sites may be minimal. But they are ignoring one critical problem: In 1994, when North Korea's program was restricted to three nuclear reactors plus the reprocessing of plutonium at Yongbyon, we might have been able to effectively eliminate it through precision strikes. By contrast, the current crisis stems from last October's revelation of North Korea's clandestine uranium-enrichment program, the location of which is unknown. Thus, eliminating Pyongyang's nuclear production capacity through precision bombing is now virtually impossible.
Target number one in a precision strike would be North Korea's reprocessing facility at Yongbyon, where plutonium is extracted from spent nuclear fuel for use in nuclear weapons. The only technological hurdle would be preventing the spread of radioactive fallout. And the good news for any such plan is that massive radioactive fallout is unlikely: A U.S. strike would almost certainly avoid dispersing more than a small fraction of North Korea's radioactive materials, and even this fallout would be largely contained within Yongbyon.
Why would fallout be contained? Inspectors saw the facility when it was roughly half finished in 1992, and American intelligence is thus able to infer what the completed plant looks like. Using this information, a careful strike that minimizes fallout should be possible. As a senior Clinton administration scientist told The New Republic, "There are likely to be ways to destroy the reprocessing plant without causing major fires and using the collapse of the heavy concrete walls to trap most of the radioactive material in the rubble, thus avoiding serious fallout at distances much beyond the Yongbyon site itself." Another knowledgeable source confirms this, adding that the radioactive mess localized to Yongbyon could be a bonus, making it difficult for the North Koreans to return and salvage valuable materials, including spent fuel rods.
The other priority target would be North Korea's nuclear reactor, also at Yongbyon, which, remembering Chernobyl, people tend to assume could not be hit without a major radiological catastrophe. Careful analysis, however, shows the reactor could be struck with little risk of major fallout. North Korea's reactor is fueled with natural uranium, a toxic but barely radioactive material. As the reactor operates, nuclear fission converts the uranium to more radioactive substances; thus, the longer the reactor has been operating, the greater the danger of radiological dispersal. Since North Korea refueled its reactor with natural uranium before restarting it barely a month ago, the risk is greatly reduced. According to the Clinton administration scientist, "A direct attack on the reactor now, before it has operated for very long with its fresh fuel load, might not spread very much high-level radioactive material." According to another knowledgeable source, detailed calculations have shown that even in a worst-case scenario--high winds, a hot graphite fire that would loft radioactive materials high in the air so they might be carried far, and a reactor that had been operating for a long time--there would be no danger beyond North Korea's borders and no immediate radiation sicknesses or fatalities beyond Yongbyon.
It's true, of course, that no attack would be risk-free, even discounting the potential for North Korean retaliation. Small amounts of fallout would be detectable in South Korea, where the p.r. crisis could be far worse for the United States than the public health one. But the larger problem is not that Yongbyon can't be bombed for safety reasons; it's that North Korea contains other nuclear sites that the United States can't bomb because we don't know where they are. Since the United States last considered air strikes, in 1994, our knowledge of North Korea's nuclear landscape has greatly deteriorated. Indeed, the current crisis started in October 2002, when the administration disclosed for the first time its knowledge of North Korea's clandestine uranium-enrichment program. Though it might be more than a year before this program yields enough material for a bomb, our knowledge of the program is so uncertain that we cannot discount the possibility that it will be successful sooner. And, unlike the reprocessing at Yongbyon, the location of the uranium program is entirely unknown. Our evidence of North Korea's enrichment program is its purchasing of centrifuge equipment and associated materials, not satellite imagery of an enrichment plant. The problem is much like in Iraq, where the world can rightly insist that Saddam has chemical weapons without being able to point inspectors to their locations. And, since, like a chemical plant, a centrifuge program consumes little electricity and can be physically small, American intelligence is unlikely to locate it. It is thus almost certain that any precision strike on North Korea's nuclear facilities will leave some of its uranium-enrichment program intact.
And hidden enrichment activity is not our only blind spot. In Disarming Strangers, Leon V. Sigal recounts that the possible presence of undetected plutonium-reprocessing facilities beyond Yongbyon was a crucial point of debate among American military planners in 1994. Today, North Korea is even more likely than in 1994 to have covert reprocessing facilities, potentially making a strike on Yongbyon even less comprehensive and, thus, less useful. Like enrichment plants, reprocessing facilities require little physical space or electricity to operate and are therefore very hard to detect. We have minimal ability to monitor their construction above ground, and the North Koreans, master tunnelers, may well have built underground, making detection all but impossible. In theory, plutonium reprocessing can be detected by mechanically sniffing for krypton-85, a gas produced by reprocessing. But emissions from Japan's and China's legitimate reprocessing facilities could drown out those from a covert North Korean program. During the 1994 crisis, some within the Clinton administration tried to rectify this by pushing for the emplacement of at least a dozen krypton-85 detectors inside North Korea. But such intrusive verification was deemed by American negotiators to be too offensive to the North Koreans, and the detector idea was scrapped, meaning that today the same uncertainty over covert facilities persists.
It would be nice if President Bush's view of the military option--if America's efforts "don't work diplomatically, they'll have to work militarily"--were accurate. But no amount of wishing will change the facts on the ground, and those facts dictate that what might be possible diplomatically--complete denuclearization of North Korea--is impossible militarily short of occupying the North. In 1994, military action, though unpalatable, was a genuine alternative for achieving the same objective sought by diplomacy. Unfortunately, it no longer is.