Lessons from the RSA

A reader, Paul Carroll, made an important point in commenting on a previous post of mine about verifying the North Korean declaration:

Obviously, when dealing with North Korea and the risk of diversion or concealment we want the uncertainty to be as low as possible. But I would urge us to caution against demanding levels of certainty that may be unattainable, and that could undermine progress on the other aspects of the deal.

Verification in North Korea is tricky because it involves ‘proving a negative’, a perennial problem that is frequently discussed on these pages. It boils down to the following question: How can North Korea demonstrate that it does not have a clandestine Pu stockpile or a uranium enrichment programme?

The IAEA faces this problem on a routine basis when trying to draw its broader conclusion about the absence of undeclared nuclear activities in a state with an additional protocol in force. John Carlson, former chairman of the Agency’s Standing Advisory Group on Safeguards Implementation, put it thus

The revolutionary aspect of safeguards development is that judgment is coming to the fore in drawing safeguards conclusions. Conclusions about the absence of something undeclared activities—can never be as definitive as conclusions based on quantitative methods applied to a finite problem—the verification of a declared inventory.

This problem was faced in verifying disarmament in South Africa—and the lessons from this case are worth reflecting on in light of the upcoming verification challenges in North Korea.

South Africa is the only state to have developed nuclear weapons indigenously and then abandoned them. When South Africa acceded to the NPT in 1991, the IAEA was tasked with verifying its initial declaration. Significantly, the results of verification were inconclusive.

To cut a long story short, there was a discrepancy between the amount of HEU South Africa had apparently produced and the amount that was in its stockpile. Such a discrepancy could have had two causes: either it was the result of errors in estimating past production (a tricky business, especially for enrichment plants) or it was indicative of the existence of a clandestine stockpile of HEU. It was impossible to tell on purely ‘technical’ grounds which explanation was correct.

In practice, of course, no-one (or at least very few people) seriously believed that South Africa had a clandestine fissile material stockpile and this raises an interesting question: How did South Africa convince the international community of the veracity of its declaration even though the results of IAEA verification activities were inconclusive?

Part of it, of course, was the broader political context. South Africa was in the process of transitioning from the apartheid system to genuine democracy. It had no security concerns that would have driven it to keep nuclear weapons and was making a concerted effort to reintegrate itself into the international community.

However, I believe that part of it was the way that South Africa built the trust of the inspectors on the ground: namely, by being exceptionally open and transparent. South Africa offered inspectors almost carte blanche to go anywhere, have access to any documents and speak to anyone—and it honoured this promise.

This transparency did not produce new information which explained away all discrepancies in the fissile material accountancy. What it did do was build the confidence of inspectors—and through them the international community—that South Africa had nothing to hide. It was a visceral thing—but no less effective for it.

Perhaps understandably, this is an aspect of the verification process in South Africa that the official history merely hints at rather than dwells upon. But, I think it’s how verification often works in practice.

The lessons from South Africa are particularly salient for North Korea. It seems that North Korea is likely to submit its declaration soon prompting the start of the verification process. If North Korea wants to demonstrate that it does not have an undeclared enrichment programme or a clandestine plutonium stockpile, transparency may be key. To convince the inspectors on the ground, active cooperation is needed; the odd concession given grudgingly within the context of an on-going battle for access won’t suffice.

However, there are also lessons here for the rest of the international community, the US in particular: namely that the results of verification can be ambiguous in a state that has nothing to hide.

Based on the objective results of verification, it might be effectively impossible for the US either to prove North Korea’s declaration is correct or to show that it has lied. If the results are indeed ambiguous, it will be very tempting for the Bush Administration to accuse the North Koreans of cheating in order to avoid a fight with Congress, which has already made noises about the Administration being weak in this area.

The only solution is to pre-empt this potential problem. The US needs to discuss these ‘what ifs’ with both North Korea and the US Congress (if it is not already doing so). It is vital that all parties have a realistic idea of what verification can—and can’t achieve—before it gets going. Otherwise the process may be doomed to fail before it’s started.