Although the IAEA’s successful dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear program silenced many of its critics and detractors and was a testimony to the Agency’s effectiveness, from an Iraqi standpoint, the inspection process had culminated in Desert Fox, sending them a harsh message. To them, the Americans were not interested in the elimination of Iraq’s nuclear program. The Iraqis understood that there would be no light at the end of the tunnel, no matter what they did. Desert Fox convinced some that the goal was not WMD disarmament, but rather regime change. In any case, their distrust of the inspection process only grew.
Four years later, when the inspections resumed, we saw this bleak sentiment expressed in the dispirited eyes and cynical statements of our Iraqi counterparts.
2
NORTH KOREA, 1992–2002
The Case of the Missing Plutonium
When I arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea, on December 4, 1992, my first thought was to be grateful that the flight had landed safely. My colleagues and I had traveled from Beijing to Pyongyang on Air Koryo, the North Korean airline, our aircraft an aging Soviet model. It hadn’t escaped my notice that, before departure, the pilot had checked the air pressure by kicking the tires with his foot.
Our handlers bundled us into government cars—old 200-series Volvos—and we headed into the city. It was midafternoon on a Friday. We were told that the basic mode of transportation for the common person was walking; there was a subway, but it did not connect the whole city, and most people were too poor to afford bicycles. We were permitted to walk about, but we saw few people on the streets. Pyongyang was a ghost town. The overall feeling of the place was eerie, the public spaces dominated by huge statues of Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader” (and father of the current “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il). On Saturday morning, we were told, every North Korean official would be attending the party headquarters for “education.”
They put us up at the Hotel Koryo, the best hotel in town. Creature comforts were limited; the hotel was excessively expensive for what it offered. There was little to no presence of electrical lighting. The food was very basic, with few choices: noodles, meat, and kimchee; no fruit or salad. If you wanted an orange, you could get it only at the hotel’s tax-free shop, paying with hard currency. And despite it being winter, the heating at the hotel was at a minimum. We had to pile on layers during the night.
In my room, I turned on the television. It was an old black-and-white model. The only channels I could get were showing films about World War II and the Korean War, with a heavy emphasis on the suffering and killing of North Koreans at the hands of the Americans and their allies.
The next evening, our hosts took us to the opera for an evening of entertainment. It was a series of staged patriotic songs. Each one ended with the Korean soldiers killing their American counterparts. It reminded me of a similar opera I had attended in Beijing in 1977, just after the end of the Cultural Revolution.
This 1992 visit to Pyongyang was a result of serious concerns regarding North Korea’s nuclear program. North Korea had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985, but it had taken seven years to complete its obligatory comprehensive safeguards agreement with the Agency enabling the IAEA to verify the country’s nuclear program. The safeguards agreement had gone into effect in April 1992. On May 4, North Korea had, as required, submitted its initial declaration of nuclear materials to the IAEA. According to the declaration, North Korea had seven sites and about ninety grams of plutonium subject to IAEA inspection. As in every safeguards agreement, the Agency was now charged with verifying that these nuclear facilities and materials were intended exclusively for peaceful purposes.
But by midsummer, questions had begun to emerge. According to North Korea, the plutonium had resulted from a single reprocessing of defective fuel rods in 1989. Of the ninety grams of plutonium produced, sixty grams were verified by the Agency during its first inspection. The North Koreans claimed that the remaining thirty grams had not been successfully extracted and were present in the waste. But the analysis of environmental samples taken by the IAEA inspectors said otherwise.
The root of the discrepancy was this: the composition of the plutonium evident in the waste samples did not match with the plutonium product presented for verification. Blix, with his customary skill in using metaphors, likened the situation to finding a pair of gloves that did not match. From a technical point of view, this meant two things. First, there had to be another collection of waste, somewhere, that matched the verified product. Second, there had to be a stash of additional plutonium somewhere that we had not seen. A key problem was that we didn’t know what kind of quantity of “additional” plutonium we were looking for—grams or kilograms.
The North Koreans were clearly surprised by the sophistication of the Agency’s analysis. Our environmental sampling techniques had helped us to determine not only the correctness of the North Korean declaration but also whether it was complete.
Their story began to change. North Korea acknowledged that they had performed “one small experiment,” to which they attributed the mismatch shown by the IAEA analysis. But this explanation didn’t fit technically. The reactor in question, a five-megawatt experimental Magnox reactor of Soviet design, had begun operation in August 1985. From their forensic study of the samples, Agency experts were able to determine that the reprocessing of fuel from the reactor to separate plutonium had taken place over a longer duration and with more complexity than the North Koreans were admitting. The inspectors concluded that, during the seven years of the reactor’s operation, North Korea had probably reprocessed spent fuel on as many as three to four occasions, and certainly more than the “one small experiment” they were suggesting.
A second area of discrepancy had to do with the concealment of nuclear facilities. The Magnox reactor was located at Yongbyon, a site about one hundred kilometers north of Pyongyang, a 2.5-to-3.5-hour drive through villages, depending on the weather. The Agency was aware of a nuclear waste storage facility at the same site, referred to as Building 500. In addition, we had seen a series of satellite photos, provided by the United States, that showed the progressive concealment of a two-story building believed to be an additional nuclear waste facility. The North Koreans had ultimately placed the entire facility underground, covering it and planting the area with trees. Two high-explosive test sites also had been identified, one near the reactor at Yongbyon and another at a site twenty kilometers away.
In late August 1992, with anxiety mounting about the inadequate answers the North Koreans were providing, another inspection was conducted. Once again, the result was a mixture of cooperation and obfuscation.
The visit was coordinated by military personnel, much of it handled personally by the commandant of Yongbyon. The North Koreans seemed to be testing the inspectors, to see how much they knew. Our initial request to inspect the two waste sites and high-explosive test sites was met with a flat refusal; then the North Koreans relented and agreed to allow the inspectors to visit the Building 500 waste site as well as the high-explosive test sites. Full cooperation, however, proved elusive. On one occasion the handlers took the inspectors to the wrong location, and then appeared upset when the inspectors pointed out the error. In the end, our North Korean counterparts denied even the existence of the second waste location, insisting that it was only military bunkers and refusing access to the Agency inspectors.