Inscrutable North Korea is up to no good. After it pretended to turning into a new leaf by agreeing to give up its nuclear weapons programme, it is supplying Syria with nuclear materials and technology on the sly.
Publicly it is agreeing like a good boy to shut down its nuclear enrichment plants and getting money and oil for its good behavior. On the sly it is selling nuclear know-how and materials to Syria and making money from that too. It is also quite possible it will in return receive enriched uranium from Syria and keep making nuclear bombs. At the moment, Korea is eating its cake and having it too.
Let us explore North Korea’s Syria angle. Syria nurses nuclear ambitions. The only way it could get the technology is either from the smuggling racket once run by Pakistani scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, or it could obtain it from North Korea. Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Semmel asserted,
We do know that there are a number of foreign technicians that have been in Syria. We do know that there may have been contact between Syria and some secret suppliers for nuclear equipment.
Semmel, responsible for nuclear non-proliferation at the State Department, has revealed that Syria has already been placed on the US nuclear watch list.
Earkier in the month, a North Korean-flagged ship, Al Hamad, arrived in the Syrian port of Tartous. Few days later, Israeli Air Force attacked an unspecified target in northeastern Syria along the Euphrates River near the border with Turkey. Experts believe that the target was a Syrian nuclear facility labeled as an agricultural research center.
However, Syria denied that Israeli jets had attacked any target in Syria. It said the Israelis were merely testing Syrian air defense. All this sounds very fishy. North Korean ships arrived in Syria in mid-2007 with cargo suspected to have included weapons of mass destruction components. Both Israel and the United States have been tracking these shipments, which in some cases were registered as cement.
The State department has refused to comment on Semmel’s statements. Why is the normally aggressive Bush administration overlooking the secret antics of Pyong Yong?
The answer comes from the statement by Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. nuclear negotiator with North Korea. He says that such reports are
important reminder of the need to accelerate the process we’re already engaged in.
The ‘process’ he refers to is the six-party initiative (Two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the US) to end North Korea’s nuclear program. The US feels taming North Korea with help of powers like Russia, China and Japan through negotiations is better than doing it the bang-bang cowboy way like it did in Iraq. Moreover Pyongyang has nuclear capability.
