Must Read: Gordon Flake on Uranium and Agreed Framework 3.0

In the endless loop of our nuclear diplomacy with North Korea, new facts, novel arguments, and original thoughts are scarce things for which we scour a hundred news stories and blog posts. Here, in this excellent two–part interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Ramstad, Gordon Flake of the Mansfield Institute explains why North Korea’s coming-out with an advanced uranium enrichment capability means that an enduring nuclear disarmament agreement is now next to impossible.

With the public display of, and formal announcement of, the uranium enrichment program, the prospects for a negotiated settlement just plummeted dramatically and the bar for any negotiations just went through the roof. That’s a fundamental change in an approach that we have been pursuing off and on for 20 years. It just became a lot harder.

You don’t have to be a nuclear specialist to understand the two different paths to a nuclear bomb. With plutonium, the control mechanisms are there. For plutonium, you have to have a reactor. It’s big. If you can freeze the reactor, you can freeze the plutonium. It’s relatively easy to freeze at the front end. With a uranium enrichment program, it’s really attempting to control the technology and the materials to build these centrifuges. But once that has been breached, there can be hundreds of sites all around North Korea. They’re small. They’re not detectable. There’s no emissions that can be detected.

So with plutonium, if you had the reactor, you could be relatively sure you had frozen the plutonium program. You’d know where others were. That would be something that would be worthwhile to buy in a negotiation. We bought it several times. There’s a strategic advantage gained by freezing them.

Now that North Korea has displayed a small uranium enrichment program, there’s no strategic advantage to be gained by freezing that plant. Because you have to assume they have got dozens, if not hundreds, of others around the country. Why would you pay to shut down something that gives you no certainties at all that you will be slowing down the program?

The other, related factor is that the inspections regime necessary to stop a plutonium program is relatively small-scale and limited. To stop a uranium program, you basically have to challenge inspections nationwide. And the North Koreans have to be actively participating in that process and declaring and working with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].

WSJ: The U.S. scientist who was shown the North Korean uranium lab, Siegfried Hecker, right away speculated there might be others. And this week we have fresh statements from Washington and Seoul that the uranium program in North Korea must have more labs than they have shown so far. Why do they think that?

Mr. Flake: Even if we don’t know for sure, you have to assume there are. Why in the world would any country, having acquired the materials and technology, put them in one single place? It makes zero sense. So they [the U.S. and South Korean governments] are trying to make a public case, saying, “˜The state of their technology would suggest to us that it has to be part of a broader program.’ That’s what they’re saying now. The flip side of that is, of course that’s true. As a national security planner, you would be irresponsible to assume otherwise.

It’s the old exterminator’s mantra: for every one you see, there’s a hundred you don’t see. You would never be satisfied with an exterminator who came into your house and killed one cockroach and said “˜I solved the problem for you.’

Of course, the North Korean revelation isn’t far off from what some of us peace-hating hard-liners had inferred for years, so in reality, no agreed framework has been verifiable since at least the late 1990’s. Thank Zeus that both agreed frameworks failed so spectacularly, lest we continue to labor under a false sense of security, let our guard down on proliferation, and perpetuate this threat with our money. But then, North Korea’s addiction to conflict with foreign devils is the undoing of all agreed frameworks, and the reason why we see a North Korean nuclear program as a threat at all.

What Flake isn’t quite saying is that any nuclear agreement from now on would require us to take Kim Jong Il’s word for it, because there aren’t going to be nationwide challenge inspections. There could be centrifuges under a palace, a military base, or a concentration camp, and our State Department and the IAEA would be told those places were off limits for other reasons (and tempted to accept North Korean assurances, no doubt). We can’t have a deal without trust, and without a fundamental change in this regime’s character and personnel, we’d be insane to trust them now.

Don’t just read that quote. The whole interview is a must-read.