ArmsControlWonk.com

Cross-posted from TotalWonkerr.com.

Why the big struggles with Iran and North Korea over nuclear weapons, nuclear technology, and delivery systems? Libya’s ambassador to the UN has the Simple Answer^TM you’ve been looking for:

“We gave some devices, some centrifuges, for example for America, but what do you give us? Nothing,” said Abdelrahman Shalgham, who served as foreign minister for eight years before being named ambassador to the United Nations this month. “That’s why we think North Korea and Iran are hesitating now to have a breakthrough regarding their projects.”

(That’s Ambassador Shalgam in happier times, above, poised to corral the Secretary of State.)

These and other remarks appear in a fine article by Michael Slackman of the New York Times. Therein, we learn that welcoming Libya back into the family of nations wasn’t enough. Partly, Libyan officials would like to see more rapid progress in civil nuclear cooperation. But most of all, they are surprised to see the continuation of the State Department’s routine hectoring on human rights:

One diplomat in Libya, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said the government was shocked that the United States still criticized Libya’s human rights record. Libya is a police state where security services operate with impunity and political opposition is not allowed.

“When you were enemies, we didn’t care,” the diplomat said after the State Department issued its latest human rights report this month. “But now, you are supposed to be friends. We were surprised. There were 16 pages targeting Libya.”

(The links are in the item as it appears at nytimes.com.)

Tripoli is 1,200 miles east and a universe away from Casablanca. One hears genuine shock and betrayal in these words. So in the interests of international understanding, allow me to assure our new Libyan friends that it’s not about them. Pretty much the entire world is represented in the State Department’s annual human rights report, with the glaring but scarcely surprising exception of the United States itself. For that, we have Mark Danner. And the People’s Republic of China, too.

Friends, enemies, and everything in between show up in the annual report. Even Canada. Even Switzerland. As far as I can tell, the one and only country that gets a pass is the Holy See.

Life’s not fair, you know?

Does the Ambassador Have a Point?

Now, having said all that, Ambassador Shalgham may have a little bit of a point. Exhibit A: North Korea. Since 2005, the United States has had not one but two special envoys for North Korea. One of them, Jay Lefkowitz — that’s his mug shot, right there — has human rights as his special charge. This has not stopped him from addressing the nuclear track, which he sees as properly interwoven with human rights and aid:

Today, a Helsinki-style model should be replicated with North Korea, and the U.S. should promote linkage among security, economic and human-rights issues. Significant economic assistance to North Korea should be offered, including development assistance, World Bank loans, trade access and food aid, but it must be given only in return for tangible, verifiable progress on all issues on the agenda. And human-rights progress should not be measured by bureaucrats meeting and reading prepared statements, but by tangible steps that move North Korea closer to the norms of the international community.

This sort of thing does not go unnoticed in Pyongyang, where it is seen as evidence of a hostile policy:

Such U.S. behavior is a very disturbing act as it is little short of challenging the DPRK which has shown generous magnanimity and flexibility for a solution to the nuclear issue and an act of throwing a hurdle in the way of the six-party talks. The U.S. seems not to be interested in the dialogue and the settlement of the nuclear issue at all but more keen on standing in confrontation with the DPRK and bringing about a “regime change” and “bringing down the system” in the DPRK. If the U.S. persists in such behavior, it will compel the DPRK to change its mind. The U.S. should abolish at once such unreasonable post of “envoy” and abandon its ambition to “bring down system in the DPRK.”

Mr. Lefkowitz doesn’t get many invitations to Pyongyang.

Square That Circle! Or Not.

So what to do when nonproliferation objectives seem to conflict with human rights objectives, or other important goals, for that matter? Your humble correspondent here won’t pretend to have Simple Answers^TM to these knotty questions. What answers he might have are neither simple nor really within the scope of an arms control blog. So let’s just conclude.

Certain other countries absolutely see America’s interest in human rights and democracy as a threat, and the mistrust this creates can seriously complicate the pursuit of other objectives. It’s not just North Korea. Take the Russians, for example, or the Iranians. (Mark Haas has placed this phenomenon in broader historical perspective.)

So before we make a serious effort to negotiate, we might want to figure out which issues we really want on the table.

And let’s recognize that some issues are likely to force themselves onto the agenda regardless. Like this or this. This being America, complicating factors like public opinion and civil society can’t be wished away. It’s a Free Country,^TM with all that entails.

Nothing’s simple, really.

Related topic: Dan Byman of Georgetown U. has asked, Do Counterproliferation and Counterterrorism Go Together?. He’s giving a talk on the subject at the University of Maryland College Park this coming April 30. Thanks, FCNL Nuclear Calendar!

Late update: Here’s the official Iranian view on human rights.

Comment [5]

Uh, well, no Mr. President, you see, it isn’t exactly like a Sit-N-Spin …

Frank Munger has great stuff on his blog again.

I missed this but, in September 2005, Y-12 General Manager Dennis Ruddy told reporters that the United States is actually operating centrifuges from Libya in order to gain insight into other countries nuclear weapons programs. Ruddy’s comment appeared in a story by Munger in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, as well an AP stories (full text of the AP story in the comments).

Munger put the relevant section about operating Libyan centrifuges on his blog. Here is the full quote from his September 26, 2005 story (“Libyan nuclear equipment still at Y-12”):

In an interview last week, Y-12 general manager Dennis Ruddy initially declined to talk about the Libyan equipment.

He later acknowledged that government experts are still visiting Oak Ridge to scrutinize the centrifuge components. “That’s a cooperative thing between us and the lab (ORNL),” he said.

Ruddy added, “There’s a lot of interest in the things that we brought back from Libya because of lot of them, looking at them, measuring the tolerances, setting them up and operating them, to a certain extent tells us how close people are to be able to get a system that can work all the way to bomb-grade material.”

I guess we should have assumed that. Still, kind of makes you take a second look at the most recent Iran NIE — especially that INR reference to “foreseeable technical and programmatic problems” — huh?

Ruddy’s comment, Munger suspects, resulted in a decision by Y-12 contractor BWXT a few weeks later to pull Ruddy’s security clearances and relieve him of his post as general manager (“Ruddy relieved of Y-12 duties,” October 12, 2005).

Bolstering Munger’s suspicion is the timing of Ruddy’s dismissal and the fact that, whenever Munger asks ORNL employees about Libya, folks clam up. “Every time I ask a question with that word in it,” Munger writes about Libya, “Oak Ridge folks act like I’ve asked them for the PIN to their bank cards.”

Comment [3]

I was contemplating a new section called “Sunday Tenet Blogging” where I patiently comb through Tenet’s memoir, picking our interesting chapters or stories for scrutiny.

Yesterday was supposed to deal with his account of the disarmament of Libya … at least until I ran into another, incredibly stupid error in Tenet’s book.

At the end of his chapter on the AQ Khan network and Libya, entitled “The Merchant of Death and the Colonel,” Tenet tells this amusing little vignette:

By mid-December [2003] enough progress had been made that the deal [with Libya] would soon become public. Even that was a carefully orchestrated dance; Gadhafi would first announce to his own people that he had decided to renounce hs WMD programs. Then Prime Minister Blair was to make public comments welcoming the news, to be followed by remarks from President Bush. The timing was tightly negotiated for December 19. And then, at the last minute, word came from Libya that the colonel wanted to delay. Uh oh, we thought. He is about to pull the rug out from under this deal. But the explanation turned out to be a simple one. The Libyan national soccer team was playing on television that night, and Gadhafi didn’t want to annoy the fans by breaking into coverage of an important game with an announcement about something most Libyans didn’t care about, weapons of mass destruction.

You see where this is going. Nope, the Libyan national soccer team did not play on December 19. Go look it up in the FIFA Database yourself (something that Tenet’s co-author and staff might have done).

Sigh.

A version of the soccer story first appeared in the British press, in a story by Andy McSmith in The Independent entitled, “Thinking the Unthinkable: How Libya Returned to the Fold”:

In Whitehall, meanwhile, they were just as anxiously monitoring the Libyan media, waiting to hear that the Foreign Minister had spoken. They were expecting the announcement early in the evening, but it appears that there was a vital football match in progress in Libya, and Mr Shalqam waited until after the final whistle before releasing his announcement at about 9pm British time. Then the translators had to get to work, and senior staff at the Foreign Office had to check that the statement was exactly as agreed. At last, at about 9.55pm, Mr [David] Hill [Tony Blair’s Director of Communications] received the call he had awaiting – just five minutes before the start of the BBC’s main news bulletin.

That version of events is more or less plausible. Libya did have soccer games taking place on December 19th (Round 10 of 26 in the Libyan Premier League). So, it seems, that the announcement was broadcast after the game.

Anyway, you can listen the announcement in Arabic on the BBC website, as well as read the Libyan, British and American statements.

Bush made his announcement 5:32 EST—a few hours after the Libyan announcement.

Comment [5]

This looks kind of interesting. Libya and the UK signed a joint letter of Peace and Security in June.

My colleague Michael Nguyen wrote about it in this month’s ACT.

He wrote:

On June 26 in Tripoli, British Junior Foreign Minister Kim Howells signed a “Joint Letter of Peace and Security” with his counterpart, Libyan Secretary for European Affairs Abdullati Obidi. The letter pledges that the United Kingdom will seek UN Security Council action if another state attacks Libya with chemical or biological weapons. The United Kingdom also pledged to aid Libya in strengthening its defense capabilities, and both states pledged to work jointly to combat the proliferation of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD).

The US apparently has no plans to follow suit anytime soon.

Comment [3]

Eben Kaplan wrote a piece a few weeks ago about the PSI. Overall, it’s not bad. But it contains an all-too-frequent error.

He wrote:

Among the PSI’s most notable successes was the 2003 interception of a shipment of nuclear centrifuge parts from the A.Q. Khan network to Libya.

Bzzzt. The BBC China wasn’t a PSI operation. I blogged about this before here. As an aside, David Sanger recently made the same mistake in this piece, calling the interdiction the PSI’s “best-known success.”

Interestingly, Ron Suskind’s new book contains an account of the CIA’s involvement in the Libyan disarmament effort. Essentially, Suskind reports that the CIA had turned Urs Tinner, who then told the agency about the shipment. Not a PSI operation.

To be fair, the BBC China mistake doesn’t really affect what appears to be Kaplan’s main argument, which is that intelligence-sharing and interdiction are good.

But it does call into question the PSI’s effectiveness for the simple reason that the Bush administration hasn’t been offering any specific evidence that the initiative works. That’s kind of a big deal, especially given that the Bush administration has pushed PSI as a substitute for arms control.

OK, stop being a dork and go do whatever it is you do…

Comment

A couple of weeks ago, Judy Miller made a passing reference to “a ‘Lessons Learned’ paper for an arms-control newsletter” written by Ambassador Donald Mahley, Senior WMD Representative in Libya.

I was like, what Lessons Learned paper? So was Kerr. Turns out, Mahley penned an article for The Arena, a publication of the now defunct Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute (CBACI, what is that, See-back-ee?).

Anyway, here is the full text of Donald Mahley, “Dismantling Libyan Weapons: Lessons Learned,” Arena 10 (November 2004).

(New! Improved! Many thanks to a loyal reader for providing an original pdf.)

Comment [3]

Friend of Wonk and Fellow Foodie Jackie Shire, in a segment titled Judy Miller, Busted Again on bloggingheads.tv, very politely points out that Judy Miller—in her return to WMD reporting—immediately returned to her old habit of making misleading statements that reflect a tenuous grasp of the subject, at best.

Jackie was nicer than I would have been. At issue is this statement in Miller’s article Wall Street Journal:

The nuclear front was more troubling. Not only had Libya developed highly compartmentalized chemical and nuclear programs that were often unknown even to the Libyans who worked at the facilities, they had already imported two types of centrifuges from the Khan network—aluminum P-1s, (for Pakistan-1), and 4,000 of the more advanced P-2s.

Um, no. Libya imported casings and other components, but only two full P2 centrifuges. Two, for those of you with limited math skills, is substantially less than four thousand. A centrifuge without a rotor is not/not a centrifuge anymore than a car without an engine. Here are the relevant passages from the IAEA report:

According to the Libyan authorities, in 1997, foreign manufacturers provided 20 pre-assembled L-14 centrifuges and components for an additional 200 L-1 centrifuges, including process gas feeding and withdrawal systems, UF6 cylinders and frequency converters.

[snip]

Libyan authorities stated that, in September 2000, Libya received two centrifuges of the type called L-2. These are similar to another European design (more advanced than the L-1 type centrifuges), and use maraging steel rotors instead of aluminium rotors. ... Out of the 10 000 centrifuges ordered, Libya had received a considerable number of parts, mainly casings, by the time of the Agency inspections in late December 2003. However, according to Libya, no additional rotors were included in the shipments.

Iran imported 22 rotors in assembeled centrifuges, 20 L-1 and 2 L-2. Libya also seems to have imported 200 L1 rotors from SCOPE in Mayalsia.

I guess Judy didn’t use her time in the jug to read old IAEA reports.

***

David Albright actually addressed this claim directly:

David Albright, former nuclear inspector and current head of the Institute for Science and International Security, has stated that official claims about the Oak Ridge display were not true, and that the 4,000 centrifuges discussed and partly shown in the display were only the centrifuge casings, not entire operational centrifuges that include the rotors. Mr. Albright stated, “We doubt they had more than two which had rotors…. make no mistake, the Libyan program was very serious and we’re glad it’s stopped… The problem from our point of view is that the White House, which basically organized the briefing, is so focused on claiming credit that it’s willing to exaggerate.”

Comment [1]