What about North Korea’s covert enrichment program?

The announcement that North Korea has agreed to halt nuclear and missile tests and to freeze uranium enrichment at Yongbyon is welcome news, but it is far from a solution to the entire nuclear problem. Even if the agreement holds, and so many have failed, it apparently ignores a likely covert North Korean uranium enrichment program.

Pyongyang expelled U.S. observers working at the Yongbyon nuclear site in March 2009, and two months later the North’s second nuclear test shook the Korean Peninsula. By November 2010, i.e. within about 20 months, North Korea built and revealed to former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sigfried Hecker a modern uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon, with perhaps as many as 2,000 centrifuges. This effectively ended years of debate within U.S. policy circles as to whether or not North Korea had been cheating on an earlier commitment not to enrich uranium.

It is virtually inconceivable that North Korea could have constructed such a facility so quickly without transferring equipment or drawing upon experience from another uranium enrichment plant built elsewhere. But such a facility has never been disclosed, and the latest agreement apparently does nothing to reveal or halt it. Thus, while perhaps a constructive step, absent further disclosures and actions, there is no reason to believe that the latest agreement has halted North Korea’s nuclear weapons production program.

The Obama administration says it won’t pay North Korea for the same horse twice. That is sound policy. This nag isn’t worth paying much for even once.