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Yesterday, Pyongyang submitted a long-overdue declaration of its nuclear programs to China, in accordance with agreements made during the six-party talks. U.S. President George W. Bush welcomed the move as "one step in the multi-step process laid out by the six-party talks," immediately lifted the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act, and notified Congress of his intent to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

What does all this mean in practice? The Bush administration's moves are highly symbolic, and unlikely to have any immediate, practical impact. Most U.S. sanctions based on the Trading with the Enemy Act (pdf) were already lifted in 2000, and most of those still in place are authorized by an overlapping hodgepodge of other laws and regulations. Minor changes will go into effect -- for instance, some imports from North Korea will no longer require licenses -- but for the most part trade policies will remain unchanged.

Bush's intention to remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list is a similarly symbolic gambit; the actual removal cannot go into effect for 45 days after the notification to Congress, and in any case it is probably contingent on verifying North Korea's nuclear declaration. Countries on the terror list cannot receive, among other things, U.S. economic aid or loans from the World Bank and other financial institutions. Removing North Korea from the list may allow more money to flow in, but, as a U.S. Treasury spokesman noted yesterday, sanctions aimed at preventing money laundering, illicit finance, and weapons proliferation will remain firmly in place.

Practicalities aside, this development has rightly been hailed as a diplomatic success; the New York Times today declared it a "triumph." The path to a denuclearized North Korea is still long and the process could easily be derailed at any point, but it is nice to finally have some reason, however slight, for optimism.

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Today, apparently, is International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is launching a new three-year campaign called "Do drugs control your life?"

But instead of releasing statements from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon or posting video clips in Serbian on YouTube, maybe the office should spend more time lobbying the Security Council and the IAEA.

The ongoing standoff with Tehran over its nuclear aims is threatening a rare cooperative venture between Iran and the West: Tehran's campaign to stem opium and other drug trafficking from Afghanistan through Iran to Europe. In a little-noticed provision in the incentives package offered to Tehran on June 14, Western countries threatened to cut off further aid to the anti-drug efforts unless Iran agrees to halt its uranium enrichment.

Such measures would harm anti-drug efforts in the Middle East and Europe, U.N. officials say. Iran caught approximately 900 tons of Afghan drugs in 2007, and UNDOC Director Antonio Maria Costa warned that a "heroin tsunami" could hit Europe if aid were cut. And it could be devastating for Iran as well. Despite devoting 30,000 troops (like the fellow in the photo above) to drug patrols in border areas, the Islamic Republic already contains the highest proportion of heroin and opium addicts in the world, experts believe.

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Last Saturday, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei sat for an Arabic-language interview on the al-Arabiya network. During a discussion about Iran, ElBaradei was asked how much time the country would need to "produce" a nuclear weapon. "It would need at least six months to one year," he replied.

Even though this estimate has been tossed around for years (particularly by Israel), given some caveats it is still within a generally accepted range of possible timelines for an Iranian bomb. ElBaradei's statement is surprising, though, because previously he has "consistently said that it would take Iran from three to eight years to make a weapon."

This sharp rhetorical shift could be the result of new findings about Iran that have not yet been released. Perhaps ElBaradei knows something we don't and he just slipped. It is possible, for example, that large numbers of Iran's third-generation centrifuges (the IR-3) are installed in secret locations. The IR-3 can probably enrich uranium significantly faster than Iran's current models and could reduce the time needed to produce enough material for a bomb. Tehran has only installed a handful of these centrifuges as far as we know, though, and is apparently still having trouble with them.

It seems far more likely that this was a signal to Iran that patience is running out. ElBaradei trained as a diplomat, and gaffe-prone individuals almost never rise to his level. He was also careful to emphasize that the threat is not imminent, noting specifically that making a weapon so quickly would require Iran to expel inspectors and withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty. In a further sign that the IAEA is willing to increase pressure, its most recent report (pdf) on Tehran's nuclear program expressed -- in unusually blunt fashion -- growing frustration within the agency at Iran’s "persistent stonewalling" and accused Tehran of withholding important information on alleged nuclear weapons programs.

So far, Iran has judged that fostering uncertainty about its nuclear weapons program would divide the international community and defuse pressure for stronger punitive actions. Hopefully, the IAEA's shift signals that Tehran has failed to divide and conquer.

In an op-ed he coauthored in Monday's Wall Street Journal Asia, McCain placed himself to the right of President Bush's policies on North Korea:

We must use the leverage available from the U.N. Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang's 2006 nuclear test to ensure the full and complete declaration, disablement and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear facilities, in a verifiable manner, which we agreed to with the other members of the six-party talks.

The key words here are "full and complete," since the Bush administration has shown flexibility on that front. And as Glenn Kessler notes, "leverage" in this instance is code for "threaten sanctions," an approach the Bush team abandoned in favor of direct diplomacy. Conservatives are increasingly critical of the current plan, under which Pyongyang would merely acknowledge U.S. concerns about uranium enrichment but admit to nothing.

In his speech in Denver Tuesday, McCain again took a hawkish line, saying, "It is a vital national interest for the North Korean nuclear program to be completely, verifiably and irreversibly ended."

Matt Yglesias thinks this illustrates that, "on national security policy, McCain is, if anything, more hard core than Bush." But I don't think he's so easy to pigeonhole. The candidate's speech is sprinkled with words like "multilateralism" and "allies" often enough to make Charlie Kupchan's heart flutter. He even spoke about working more closely with Russia to reduce nuclear stockpiles. That doesn't sound like Bush 2.0 to me.

Many commentators have wondered why the Bush adminstration chose last Thursday, of all days, to disclose the intelligence community's findings on North Korea's nuclear collaboration with Syria. Well, Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright of the Washington Post have an answer:

Key lawmakers nonetheless made it clear that unless the intelligence about Syria was described to them in detail, they would block funding for the deal and oppose a key waiver of a law preventing U.S. aid to a country that detonates a nuclear weapon.

Officials said the timing of the administration's disclosure was also influenced by a provision of the U.S. law governing state sponsors of terrorism, a list that has long included North Korea. Under the proposed nuclear disarmament deal, Washington has agreed to remove North Korea from the list, but the law requires that it first demonstrate that North Korea has not assisted another country on the list for at least six months. The intelligence presented this week indicated that North Korea helped Syria in removing equipment from the site through early October, meaning the six-month window only recently closed.

Far more often than they get credit for, U.S. officials do things that seem mysterious to outsiders when in reality they're just following the law. In this case, the aim was ostensibly to move North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism so that a deal could go forward. The irony is that with this disclosure, Republican lawmakers may be much less inclined to give North Korea a pass, and even leading establishment figures want the Bush administration to teach Kim Jong Il a lesson. What seems especially damning is the intelligence showing that North Korea has been dealing with the Syrians all along while pretending to negotiate in good faith.

As an aside, I owe Kessler an apology for this post and this one questioning his early reporting on the Syrian nuclear site. It turns out Kessler's reporting was spot-on and appropriately caveated, and continues to be invaluable. His biography of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is excellent, too.

Earlier this week, intelligence officials released new evidence confirming that the "Box on the Euphrates" near al-Kibar in Syria was in fact a nuclear reactor. They also released photographs that they used to argue that North Korea was providing significant levels of assistance to the reactor project in Syria.

The Syrian facility apparently contained a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor (a derivation from the Calder Hall design) extremely similar to the reactor at Yongbyon. It's a relatively simple design, extensively described in the public domain, and one that's capable of producing plutonium useable in nuclear weapons. Despite the surfeit of publicly available information on the reactor, the intelligence community firmly asserts that, in this case, the design information came from North Korea.

Noting that the Syrian reactor seemed ill-suited to electricity production (not least because there were no detectable power lines leading away from the site), intelligence analysts also concluded that it would have few uses other than for producing plutonium for an illicit nuclear weapons program. Israel came to a similar conclusion and, judging this to be a potentially existential threat, bombed the reactor as a result.

These revelations raise more questions than they answer. For instance, why release this evidence now? The analysts said it was hoped that, among other things, releasing this information would prod the North Koreans to be more forthcoming in the six-party talks. It seems just as likely that they may just be infuriated and walk away from negotiations (there is no public sign of such a reaction yet, though).

Perhaps most notable in the briefing on Thursday was how coy the analysts were being about the possibility that Syria has a covert nuclear weapons program. They noted very specifically that "there is no reprocessing facility in the region of al Kibar," but refused to elaborate when asked whether the Syrians might be building such a facility elsewhere. They also refused to comment on how Syria might have been planning to acquire the natural uranium required to fuel the reactor and they dodged a question about how North Korean diplomats have so far reacted to this disclosure.

These omissions could be designed to minimize diplomatic blowback -- perhaps the administration simply hoped to nudge the North Koreans gently, rather than shove them -- or perhaps the spooks simply don’t have much more information. Hopefully the North Korean and Syrian reactions over the next week or so will provide more insight. Watch this space.

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North Korea has been stepping up incendiary rhetoric in the past few days, ostensibly in response to South Korean comments that it would attack the North's nuclear installations in the event that Pyongyang launched atomic weapons. Once the North's preemptive attack is underway, the Korean Central News Agency declared, "everything will turn to ashes, not just a sea of flames."

Coupled with missile tests and diplomatic maneuvers, these comments are worrisome but not necessarily out of the ordinary for Pyongyang. Nevertheless, North Korea's claim is worth investigating: Can it really turn "everything" into ashes, or even "just" a sea of flames, given its relatively miniscule nuclear arsenal?

If "everything" means all of South Korea, the answer is definitely no. If it means Seoul, the question requires a bit more examination. Basically we need to know how many nuclear weapons Pyongyang has and how powerful they are. Knowing these facts allows some projections that, while extremely rough, are nonetheless interesting.

Very little reliable information exists, but based on aggregated seismic data from North Korea's 2006 nuclear test, Harvard analyst Hui Zhang estimates (pdf) that the yield of that explosion was between 0.5 and 2 kilotons (for comparison, the yield of the weapon used at Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons, while other countries' first nuclear tests generally yielded 9 kilotons or above). For simplicity’s sake, let's assume North Korea's test yielded about a kiloton. It is even more unclear what the weapon was designed to yield, but it was probably supposed to be between 4 and 20 kilotons.

As for the number of weapons, North Korea has recently declared (pdf) that it has 30 kilograms of separated, potentially weapons-usable plutonium. More almost certainly exists, but all of Pyongyang's usable plutonium has probably not been made into weapons. Since an implosion-type weapon requires (pdf) about 5 kg of plutonium, North Korea likely has at most six weapons.

Excluding fires and making some other simplifications, if we assume that Pyongyang can do no better than a 1-kiloton air burst, each explosion would kill about 50 percent of the population within a fifth of a mile. Six bombs would therefore kill half the population within about two thirds of a square mile -- an area encompassing not even half a percent of Seoul, which is about 234 square miles.

If, on the other hand, North Korea has six 10-kiloton bombs, it could kill 50 percent of the population in just over 3 square miles of Seoul -- slightly over 1 percent of the city's area. These calculations are probably very conservative, but even if the damages wildly exceeded expectations it seems unlikely more than 10 percent of Seoul's area would see widespread destruction. I certainly do not intend to minimize the horror of that level of death and destruction. But if North Korea wants to burn all of Seoul to ash, it is going to need more than a tiny nuclear arsenal to do so.

The U.S. intelligence community has taken a beating in some quarters for its National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) on Iran's nuclear program, which was released to the public last December. CFR.org recently got a hold of Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produced the NIE in question.

Fingar says they would have framed the NIE differently had they known it was going to be made public:

There's been talk that the Iran NIE was narrowly written, excluding the civilian capabilities, excluding ballistic missile testing or capabilities, and I wonder if you can respond to those claims. And to follow, do you think it was poorly written? Would you have done it differently if you could?

No, we dealt at length with the centrifuge enrichment, and dealt with the missile program. It was not a narrowly crafted [document] — people are reacting to a two-and-a-half-page summary of a 140-page document with almost 1,500 source notes. And believe it or not, you can't fit the whole book on the book jacket. Was it badly written? The [still classified] estimate itself is very well written. The key judgments, knowing what we do now about the way in which they were spun, perceived, used by folks when released — if we thought for a minute they would be released, which we didn't, we would have framed them somewhat differently. The judgments would be the same. But we would have framed them somewhat differently that says: “Dear readers [not] following this: You can't have a bomb unless you have fissile material, [and] the Iranians continue to develop fissile material. A weapon is not much good if you can't deliver it—they have a missile-development program. But you don't have a bomb unless you can produce a device and weaponize it. That's what's stopped."

Read the whole thing.

Over at Democracy Arsenal, a blog about foreign policy from a Democratic perspective, Michael Cohen says he thinks all the excitement over the New York Philharmonic's trip to Pyongyang is a bit ridiculous:

Look, I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon... but I really don't see how this event does anything to impact the terrible existence of the North Korean people. It seems instead to me as if the Philharmonic (well meaning as they certainly are) was played for a patsy.

That's certainly the tenor of comments you'll get from folks like Brian Meyers, the dean of international studies at Dongseo University in Pusan, who believes the trip was a propaganda boon to Kim Jong Il's regime.

I wonder, though, who was really making the claim that the trip would help the North Korean people? The question at hand is whether the Philharmonic's performance could somehow help move the nuclear negotiations along. For some answers on that front, check out FP's interview with Nam Sung-wook, a top "North Koreanologist" at Korea University in Seoul.

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The gleeful spin from Tehran ahead of the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran's nuclear activities, due any day now, is that the IAEA will declare Iran "clean." In other words, the agency will say that Iran has answered all the tough questions and that, as per the controversial U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, the country has no secret weapons program. Such predictions can be fairly dismissed as Persian bluster coming from the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but no less a figure than powerful Iranian cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani seems confident the IAEA will exonerate his country.

There have been rumors of a dispute within the IAEA over the technical findings of the report, though the organization denies any serious internal disagreements. If anything, the dispute is likely to come from the United States and its European allies, who want to see a third round of U.N. sanctions imposed on Iran. A clean bill of health would obviously undermine that push. TFB, one anonymous IAEA offical told Reuters:

If the facts are at odds with the policy objectives of some people who are keen to impose further sanctions on Iran, that's too bad.

In all likelihood, the IAEA's forthcoming report will not clear up all the remaining issues, especially when it comes to weaponization. But that won't stop the Iranians from declaring victory.

Back in September, the experts surveyed for FP's Terrorism Index ranked Pakistan as the country "most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists." With 74 percent of the vote, this clearly wasn't a tough call. But according to two Pakistani military officers, it's the United States that has the problem with nuke security. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports on a press conference in Islamabad from a few days back:

... Pakistani Brig. Gen. Atta M. Iqhman expressed concern about U.S. procedures for handling nuclear weapons. Iqhman, who oversees the safety and security of the Pakistani nuclear force, said that U.S. protocols for storing and handling nuclear weapons are inadequate. "In Pakistan, we store nuclear warheads separately from their delivery systems, and a nuclear warhead can only be activated if three separate officers agree," Iqhman said. "In the United States, almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons still sit atop missiles, on hair-trigger alert, and it only takes two launch-control officers to activate a nuclear weapon. The U.S. government has persistently ignored arms control experts around the world who have said they should at least de-alert their weapons."  

Iqhman also said the Pakistani government would be willing to provide assistance and advice on nuclear handling and security. U.S. officials, unsurprisingly, had no comment. While there may be legitimate concerns about the hair-trigger launching procedure for American nukes, it's doubtful U.S. military officials have much to learn from A.Q. Khan's homeland on this issue. Or do they? Iqhman's deputy, Colonel Bom Zhalot, added this twist:

We also worry that the U.S. commander-in-chief has confessed to having been an alcoholic. Here in Pakistan, alcohol is 'haram,' so this isn't a problem for us. Studies have also found that one-fifth of U.S. military personnel are heavy drinkers. How many of those have responsibility for nuclear weapons?"

Definitely read the whole article for Col. Zhalot's thoughts on religion, Hiroshima, and the sanctity of life. It only gets better.

Update: Looks like I was taken by those pranksters at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The article turns out to be a satire, and a brilliant one at that. In retrospect, the MSNBC reporter named "Jay Keuse" probably should have tipped me off. In my defense, this sort of pushback seems totally plausible coming from the Pakistani military, which has been adamant that its nukes are secure.

David Albright/ISIS

Recent reports from European diplomats have revealed a worrisome development: Iran is testing a new, more sophisticated type of centrifuge for enriching uranium. On a technical level, this demonstrates the skills of Iran's engineers, who appear to have applied "considerable technical creativity" to solve problems caused by manufacturing limitations along with export controls and sanctions. Politically, it demonstrates that Iran has, for now, no intention of bowing to U.N. Security Council demands and ceasing its enrichment activities.

Dubbed the IR-2, Iran's new centrifuge model is an Iranian-designed variant of the P-2 centrifuge used in Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. The original P-2 design, obtained by Iran in 1995 from the A.Q. Khan network, was apparently too difficult for Iran's engineers to manufacture without help. Iranian experts have reportedly succeeded in building and testing a few at Iran's enrichment plant in Natanz, but the Institute for Science and International Security believes (pdf) that Iran cannot make large numbers of the IR-2 without importing certain key items.

Even though the IR-2 appears to be easier for Iran to build, the new centrifuge maintains the same production capacity as Pakistan's P-2. Both can enrich uranium about 2.5 times faster than the P-1 centrifuges Iran has already been running at Natanz. Under optimal conditions, about 1,200 IR-2 centrifuges would need to operate for a year to make enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear warhead. The same goal would require about 3,000 P-1 centrifuges. (Natanz probably has about this many P-1s, but they have not been operating at full capacity.)

While not proof that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, perfection of the IR-2 could make a nuclear "breakout" scenario more feasible in the medium term. Iran has had some trouble perfecting operation of the P-1 centrifuges it already has, but one nuclear official said the IR-2 was "more ingenious" than the unreliable P-1. The comment implies that the new design might be easier for Iran to operate. That fact, coupled with a much higher rate of production, would make it much easier for Iran to make quick progress to high levels of enrichment (and, therefore, a nuclear weapon), if it decides to go that route. Notably, Iran was also able to develop the new centrifuge in secret. If the Iranians were able to hide development of a new centrifuge, might they also be more likely able to hide continuing weapons development?

That said, relatively little concrete information on this development is in the public domain. Watch this space for more detailed commentary when the IAEA releases its next report, hopefully at the end of the month.

What was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doing last month when he donned these funkadelic shades?

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My guess? He was trying to envision a world without Israel. Send us your own one-liners via e-mail, and we'll print the best entry below.

UPDATE: And the winning entry, sent in by reader LHE—

The press awaits Ahmadinejad's review of "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour in 3D."

Thanks to all those who participated. Good stuff! 

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Last summer I wrote briefly about the "nuclear renaissance," the widely anticipated shift to nuclear power as oil prices skyrocket and concern about global warming increases. Such anticipation has given rise to comments like this one, from the head of the French nuclear giant Areva:

We are facing a nuclear renaissance. Nuclear's not the devil anymore. The devil is coal."

Earlier this month, predictions of a nuclear renaissance were seemingly borne out in Britain, when the government announced its support for the construction of new nuclear power plants in the country to replace the current, aging fleet of reactors. All but one of Britain's nuclear power plants, which together supply 20 percent of the country's electricity, are slated to close by 2023. Because the lead time for constructing new reactors is so long (due to regulatory and construction requirements), a decision to replace the current fleet must be made soon.

The fine print of the British government's decision, though, highlights just how uncertain the nuclear renaissance still is. Energy companies will almost certainly pay the full costs of building and operating the new plants in the UK, but it remains unclear whether this will be economically feasible for them—especially since the government hasn't determined how nuclear waste will be disposed and who will pay for it. But the British public is warming to the idea of nuclear power, so there may be increasing pressure on policymakers to find solutions to these issues.

Not so in Germany, where opposition to nukes remains deeply entrenched. A program to completely phase out the country's nuclear power generation has been in place for seven years. Politicians and the public remain supportive of eliminating nuclear power, but polls show most Germans have no sense of how much their country currently relies on nuclear energy. This may have something to do with Germany's near-fanatical fondness for solar power. Polls also show that 63 percent of Germans believe solar power can provide most of their energy needs over the next three decades. (In fact, only 0.4 percent of cloudy Germany's electricity is solar-generated.)

With prospects for a global nuclear renaissance still murky, it should not be surprising that the big nuclear energy companies like Areva in France or RWE and E.ON in Germany are casting their sights on Britain for new business opportunities. Within Germany, though, we may soon find out whether other types of low-carbon energy sources are ultimately feasible for large-scale electricity production. If not, technologies like nuclear energy or carbon capture for coal power will need a second look.