Nukes: Is the Intel on North Korea as Bad as It Was on Iraq?

NewsweekJan. 26 issue - Stung by Saddam's disappearing WMD, the U.S. intelligence community is re-examining North Korea's supposed nukes program—and finding what one senior administration official called "uncomfortable parallels" with Iraq. In the summer of 2002, the Bush administration charged that the North had a secret program using high-speed centrifuges to enrich uranium. Stunningly, Pyongyang agreed—and raised the stakes by claiming to have extracted more plutonium from some 8,000 stockpiled reactor fuel rods. True?—or nuclear blackmail to get food and aid? Earlier this month North Korean officials told a U.S. delegation that they had no nuclear weapons, nor a secret uranium-enrichment program. The team is to report to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this week. But their debriefings to official Washington have already caused a stir because of skepticism about the intel community's WMD work. (The CIA denies any North Korea review was prompted by the Iraq experience.) On North Korea, doubters point out that plutonium reprocessing plants give off signature emissions. After one whiff detected last summer, U.S. sensors ringing North Korea have picked up nothing since. The United States and Germany did block one North Korea-bound consignment of aluminum tubes of centrifuge specs, but those would have equipped only a pilot plant. Most fundamentally, sources say, the United States has no evidence that North Korea has ever mastered the ferocious technical challenge of turning plutonium into a usable weapon.

—John Barry and Mark Hosenball

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.