China’s Nuclear Warning Twenty Years After an Iran-Style Deal, North Korea has 20 Bombs.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-nuclear-warning-1429831422
Even China is now raising flags about nuclear proliferation. Beijing helped Pakistan get the bomb in the 1980s and has been North Korea’s patron from one Dear Leader to the next. But in February Chinese officials warned a group of Americans that Pyongyang has many more nuclear warheads than previously believed: up to 20 already, perhaps 40 by next year.
The new Chinese assessment, reported Thursday by the Journal, is based on updated intelligence concerning North Korea’s ability to enrich uranium. The North Koreans had no such capability when they signed the 1994 Agreed Framework with the Clinton Administration, which required them to stop their nuclear-weapons efforts.
But Pyongyang cheated on that deal, not least by developing a uranium-enrichment program first acknowledged to the Bush Administration in 2002. The North Koreans tested their first bomb in 2006 and were later discovered to be building a secret nuclear facility in the Syrian desert, which was destroyed by Israeli warplanes in 2007. The Bush Administration rewarded this behavior with a new nuclear deal—which Pyongyang again violated by testing bombs in 2009 and 2013.
That’s the depressing record of Washington’s last diplomatic attempt at stopping a rogue regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, and we only wish that it had proved to be instructive. Yet the deal the Obama Administration is now negotiating with Tehran looks to be incorporating the same mistakes. The Iran deal also has many more moving parts, making it considerably more difficult to enforce. Last time around it was relatively easy to tell when the North was breaking its promises.
Iran is also a much richer, more technologically sophisticated and strategically influential country than North Korea. At least Pyongyang doesn’t have the kind of control over its neighbors that Tehran enjoys in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Iran and North Korea have extensive diplomatic and military ties, with Pyongyang helping supply the Iranians with ballistic-missile technology and, according to news reports, hosting Iranian scientists at its nuclear tests. Nobody should rule out the possibility that a portion of Pyongyang’s growing stockpile—to say nothing of the know-how that goes into building it—may someday come into Iranian hands. Which is a stark reminder that the consequences of misbegotten arms-control with one dictatorship are rarely limited to that dictatorship.
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