Loose thinking on N. Korea's nuclear bomb

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Pakistan has four nuclear bombs, India 20 and Israel 200, far more than North Korea. How do I know? I don't for sure. It's merely a shrewd guess. It just happens I'm not a CIA staffer so my opinion doesn't go into the policy-making machine. But when we have President Jimmy Carter telling us, following an intensive CIA briefing, that he doesn't think North Korea actually has a bomb but ex-CIA director Robert Gates tells us that it probably has one or two, one reasonably informed guess in this business is perhaps as good as another.

I do know for certain, however, that Russia still has well over 5,000 bombs. And I do know, given the growth of the Russian mafia and the weakness of Russian accounting methods, that the chances of Iran or Libya buying one on the black market sometime in the next two years is unquestionably higher than buying one from North Korea. Apart from speed of delivery it would probably work better too. Deep down the western powers are more worried about the Russian bombs than North Korea's. It just hasn't received the hype that North Korea has.

Neither has the Pakistani bomb which for years U.S. presidents and Pakistani prime ministers connived to keep secret. Now, none less than the charming Benazir Bhutto has confessed to her country's possession. Clinton accepts this with less fuss than if she'd canceled a dinner date and even offers to sell her state-of-the-art F-16s as long as she is content with the arsenal she has.

The Clinton Administration has introduced into the nuclear debate the quaint notion of "grandfathering" i.e. there is not much this Administration can do about what it has inherited; it can only create a fuss about future developments.

Hence we have passive acquiescence in Pakistan, India and Israel's nuclear armory and a preparedness to compromise over what North Korea already has (or doesn't have).

The Administration says it draws the line with the spent fuel rods now in a pooling pond under the watchful eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors. These, it insists, must not be reprocessed as that could provide plutonium for four to six bombs.

The ignorance of the spooks and the dithering of the Clinton Administration is one thing, the arguments of the main hardliners, former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates quite another, who want us to go into battle despite the lack of clear-cut evidence of malfeasance. Clinton must sometimes wonder if it would have been more sensible if he'd lost the election. Then these Republican advisors would have had to lie on the bed that was made on their watch.

Not only has he to deal with their hypocrisy over India, Pakistan and Israel but with their vacuous solutions to the present crisis.

Robert Gates and Brent Scowcroft argue that the U.S. should hurry to bomb the North Korean reprocessing plant, which if done quickly before the cooling rods are transferred to it would minimize the risk of radioactive fall-out. The trouble is if Carter is wrong and Gates is right about Pyongyang already having one or two bombs the revenge could be terribly bitter.

Henry Kissinger, for his part, advocates tough sanctions and unspecified "military action". His timetable miraculously allows time, a short three months while the rods cool, for a conference of the nuclear -- haves plus Japan and for sanctions. Military action should only occur, he says, if Pyongyang refueled its reactor or started to reprocess the plutonium from the cooled rods. But he does not fully consider Gates' and Scowcroft's point about the danger of an aerial bombardment on reprocessing facilities, as opposed to the ponds. Nor does he appear to worry that North Korea might use the two bombs he believes it has -- and it North Korea does have them you can be sure they are stored in deep -- impenetrable bunkers -- to repulse an American ground attack.

If we persist at looking at the problem in a conventional way it is as far as I can discern insolvable, short of risking nuclear war -- that is the essence of the belated Republican advice. This is why we must hope that Jimmy Carter's unconventional breakthrough still has life in it despite the untimely death of Kim Il-sung, a death, by the way, that Robert Gates suggests, on no more evidence than you and I have, could be murder.