US case against North Korea 'overstated'
By Anna Fifield in Seoul, December 9 2004
The US has exaggerated its claims about North Korea's weapons of mass
destruction in the same way it distorted evidence about Iraq's weapons
capability, according to a report from a respected North Korea expert.
As Condoleezza Rice prepares to take over as new secretary of state, the report challenges her defence of intelligence on Iraq: that the US could not afford to “be wrong on the short side”.
“Although it is now widely recognised that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence data it used to justify the invasion of Iraq, most observers have accepted at face value the assessments the administration has used to reverse the previously established US policy towards North Korea,” Selig Harrison, the director of the Asia programme at the Center for International Policy in Washington, writes in an article to be published in Foreign Affairs next month.
In 2002, the US accused North Korea of secretly developing a weapons-grade uranium enrichment programme, contravening the two countries' 1994 agreement that Pyongyang would not pursue nuclear weapons. Mr Harrison, who has had high-level access to North Korean leaders since 1972, helped broker the 1994 pact. Pyongyang denies having enriched uranium and the stand-off remains the largest barrier to six-party negotiations over dismantling North Korea's nuclear facilities.
But amid all discussion about how the crisis can be resolved, the lack of credible evidence to back up Washington's uranium accusation had been overlooked, said Mr Harrison, suggesting the lines between weapons-grade and lower levels of enrichment might have been blurred.
“Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did in Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons,” he said.
Mr Harrison said there was no evidence to support the Central Intelligence Agency's claim in 2002 that Pyongyang had acquired centrifuge-related materials in large quantities, leading it to charge North Korea with constructing a uranium enrichment plant.
Furthermore, the failure to distinguish between civilian and military uranium enrichment had greatly complicated what were already difficult negotiations, and had distracted attention from the more pressing issue of plutonium reprocessing, he said.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, this week said he was certain that North Korea had converted its 8,000 spent plutonium rods into fuel for four to six nuclear bombs.
“It is high time for the US to switch course and deal with North Korea's plutonium first,” Mr Harrison said. “Only after a relaxation of tensions with Pyongyang, through step-by-step mutual concessions, is the full truth about its uranium capabilities likely to be known, and only then can definitive action be taken to put the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle.”
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