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| Pakistan May Have Aided North Korea A-Test |
| 2004-02-27 |
| The Times requires registration The revelations about the international nuclear trading of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan have rekindled a debate inside the American intelligence community over an unresolved but crucial strategic question from the last decade: did Pakistan conduct a secret nuclear weapons test in partnership with North Korea? Startling clues were detected after underground tests that Pakistan carried out in May 1998, when it proved to the world that its own efforts to build nuclear weapons had succeeded. According to former and current American intelligence officials, an American military jet sent to sample the air after the final test in the wastelands of the Baluchistan desert picked up traces of plutonium. That surprised experts at the Los Alamos national laboratory, because Pakistan said openly that all of its bombs were fueled by highly enriched uranium, produced at Dr. Khan’s laboratories. Among the possible explanations hotly debated after the tests was that North Korea — perhaps in return for the help from Dr. Khan — might have given Pakistan some of its precious supply of plutonium to conduct a joint test of an atomic weapon. The debate over the 1998 tests was never settled and fell into obscurity, until Dr. Khan confessed last month that he had spread nuclear skills and equipment to North Korea, as well as Libya and Iran, over more than a decade. Now the old argument has been reignited in the United States’ national laboratories, and it gained new urgency in light of multilateral talks this week in Beijing to persuade North Korea to halt and dismantle its nuclear weapons programs. If experts confirm that the 1998 tests involved both Pakistan and North Korea, it would strongly suggest that North Korea can not only produce plutonium but build a weapon, the "nuclear deterrent force" it claimed to possess before the talks. The Central Intelligence Agency has been urgently preparing a report this week on what North Korea may have gained from Dr. Khan’s nuclear dealings, American officials said, to supply new evidence to American negotiators in the Beijing talks. North Korea has never tested a weapon on its own territory, leading many to wonder whether it can make working bombs. That is why the mystery of the last Pakistani test, on May 30, 1998, is tantalizing. Of several tests Pakistan conducted then, the last one differed from those that preceded it in other ways besides the plutonium traces it produced. It was 60 miles away from the first test site. The shaft leading to the bomb was dug vertically rather than horizontally, experts said, a lower cost method. The detonation was also smaller. Pakistani officials said they had used a "miniaturized" device, but gave no other details. By all accounts, Dr. Khan was closely involved with that final test. The next day, asked by a reporter about rumors that Pakistan had once tested a weapon in China, Dr. Khan snapped, "No country allows another country to explode a weapon." But at the Los Alamos laboratory, some experts believed that might have been exactly what happened. Pakistan, most analysts believed, had insufficient material and experience to make a plutonium bomb. "It could only have come from one of two places: China or North Korea," said one senior intelligence official involved in the debate. "And it seemed like China had nothing to gain," he said, from providing plutonium to Pakistan. Robert J. Einhorn, a nuclear intelligence official in the State Department at the time, noted that Pakistan and North Korea had common interests. "The Pakistanis had already purchased long-range missiles from North Korea," he recalled. But he said it was "speculation" that North Korea supplied plutonium for the test. "It’s conceivable that Pakistani testing was providing data that was benefit to the North Koreans, but hard evidence doesn’t exist on it," he said. Eventually the debate faded, until Dr. Khan’s admissions. A retired Pakistani military officer said this week North Korean technicians worked at Dr. Khan’s lab in 1998. But he said the collaboration was on missiles, and he never suspected Dr. Khan of nuclear proliferation. Today, skeptics ask why North Korea would have wanted to test a bomb in Pakistan in 1998 when it was thought to have only a limited supply of plutonium. "It doesn’t seem logical," a federal nuclear analyst said. Another said some evidence suggested the plutonium was older than the North Korean program. However, a third analyst urged new analyses. American agents could gather material from the top of the Pakistani test shaft to settle the question of whether it really vented plutonium, he suggested. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #2 So, that answers that question. The NORKs have tested an implosion device. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-2-27 7:52:30 AM |
| #1 Oops. |
| Posted by: Paul Moloney 2004-2-27 4:54:58 AM |