Mushrooms For Breakfast

It was The New York Times which blew the whistle, quoting intelligence officials who alleged that Pakistan was a major supplier of critical equipment to North Korea’s N-weapons programme. The equipment, which may have included gas centrifuges used to create weapons-grade uranium (the other N-weapon type is plutonium-based), appears to have been part of a barter deal begun in the late ’90s in which North Korea supplied Pakistan with the missiles to counter India’s nuclear arsenal. "What you have here," said an US official familiar with the intelligence, "is a perfect meeting of interests. The North had what the Pakistanis needed, and the Pakistanis had a way for Kim Jong Il to restart a nuclear programme we had stopped."

North Korea’s admission of a secret nuclear programme came after a US delegation headed by assistant secretary of state James A. Kelly presented detailed evidence of a covert nuclear weapons programme during his visit to Pyongyang in the first week of October. The initial North Korean reaction was to call the charges "fabrications", but a day later deputy foreign minister Kang Sok Joo confirmed Kelly’s charges.

Press reports in the late ’90s had suggested that North Korea had developed a second-track uranium enrichment facility to obtain an alternative fuel for nuclear weapons. Its original plutonium-based programme was discontinued following the 1994 Agreed Framework with the US in which Pyongyang agreed to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. In return, the US and its allies were to build two light-water reactors, at a cost of more than $4 billion.

Joel Wit, a senior fellow with Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, was a coordinator for the 1994 deal. The Framework, he explained to Outlook, restricted the plutonium production programme that could have resulted in a nuclear stockpile of hundreds of thousands of weapons. US Secretary of state Colin Powell claims the North Koreans have violated the Agreed Framework. But Wit maintains that the plutonium production programme was frozen and that it remains so, and that the Agreed Framework remains intact regardless of what Powell says.

Analysts feel this is where Pakistan stepped in. It perhaps supplied gas centrifuges which enabled North Korea to develop weapons-grade uranium. Joseph Cirincione, director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says it would be perfectly logical to assume that Pakistan provided the nuclear technology in exchange for Pyongyang’s missiles. "It’s a logical deal, and at the time it must have made perfect sense from the Pakistani point of view," he told Outlook.

Trade between the two countries appears to have started around 1997 and there is evidence of it continuing past September 11, 2001. US officials estimate that North Korea’s highly enriched uranium project started some time around 1997-98, roughly the same time Pakistan tested the Nodong missiles (rechristened Ghauri in Pakistan) it received from the former. Clinton administration officials now say they had been unable to figure out how Pakistan, virtually broke at the time, could afford the missiles. But it’s now becoming clear what happened.

Robert Einhorn, an assistant secretary for non-proliferation in the Clinton administration, told Outlook, "I am not making the assertion that Pakistan provided assistance to North Korea, but I can say that there has been speculation along those lines. The North Koreans provided Nodong missiles to Pakistan, and concerns were raised whether there was a quid pro quo in the form of enrichment technology."

Pakistan seems to have had more than just a passing involvement in the North Korean nuclear weapons programme. In March 2001, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, hailed as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, and Dr Ishfaq Khan, chairman of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission, were asked by President Pervez Musharraf to retire from active service. This had surprised many. For Qadeer, who was then the head of A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta, had been associated with Pakistan’s nuclear programme for almost 27 years. Political and religious parties there were quick to accuse Musharraf of sidelining them at Washington’s behest.

The accusation has gained credibility in the light of the North Korean crisis. In the four years that preceded his retirement, sources say Khan made 13 visits to North Korea. "He made 12 separate trips to Pyongyang," says Cirincione, underscoring the "intimate and personal relationship" the scientist shared with North Korea. Dr George Perkovich, vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Outlook that for a number of years, "responsible Pakistani officials have been concerned that Abdul Qadeer Khan was a dramatic character who needed to be watched closely".

Even with all this, there has been no move on the US part to penalise Pakistan. Instead, officials in Washington were tight-lipped on the latter’s role in the crisis. Powell has consistently hedged the Pakistan question, saying he didn’t want to get into who provided what, and claiming Musharraf had assured him "400 per cent" that Pakistan was "not participating in any such activity".

Cirincione is sceptical about the credibility of these assurances and wants Pakistani promises to be double-checked. Einhorn, too, says the US should urge Pakistan "in the strongest terms" to adopt the strictest possible controls on the export of N-material or technology, as also on nuclear scientists.

Meanwhile, Washington’s gameplan is best argued by Leonard S. Spector, of the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ Centre for Nonproliferation Studies. He explains, "We have made a commitment to Musharraf in which we look to him as a restraining force in many areas—we look to him to restrain the jehadis in Kashmir and Pakistan’s nuclear activities." The initial response would be to react sharply, concedes Spector, but adds that "the core of our approach has been to make Pakistan a partner and hope a moderate viewpoint will prevail".

Not many in Washington now believe Pakistan has been a trustworthy ally. Says Perkovich, "Ours is a relationship of hoped-for mutual interests. It’s not that people are going to be shocked that someone they thought was a saint has turned out to be a sinner." Analysts, though, predict Washington might soon start taking a hard look to determine whether Pakistan helped other countries, particularly Iran, with their N-weapons programme.

Senior officials and analysts in Washington are also sceptical about whether the North Koreans actually possess a nuclear weapon in their arsenal. The Central Intelligence Agency’s National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, reported that North Korea could have at best produced one or two plutonium-based nuclear weapons by the mid-1990s. The unsupervised refuelling of the reactor at Yongbyon in the early 1990s first raised concerns that they were extracting plutonium from used fuel rods. Intelligence agencies concluded that they might have extracted enough for one of two nuclear devices.

Einhorn says that he does not think North Korea has produced any highly enriched uranium from its second track uranium enrichment programme. "The programme," he surmises, "is probably at an early stage." It’s probably also the reason why Washington remains tight-lipped on Pakistan’s role in it.