China Axis of Evil? China Supports Korean Nukes?

This is something we all have to take a long hard look at and come to the conclusion China is not our friend. But it does seem strange, given their existence depends on the survival of the American economy, that China would support a program, a Korean nuclear device that could be detonated in America, that would cause it's own economy to implode.

We have to be their largest trading partner and they own a huge part of our debt, so why do this? What is their motivation? How can they gain from helping to destroy the world economy?


China Joins the Axis of Evil
Pyongyang's nuclear program would have been impossible without Beijing.
· By BRET STEPHENS WSJ 12-7-10

Last month, U.S. nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker paid his fourth visit to North Korea, where he was granted a tour of some of the hermit kingdom's nuclear facilities. Think WikiLeaks is bad? Compared to what the former director of the Los Alamos lab saw, it's nothing.
Mr. Hecker was given a tour of a construction site where Pyongyang intends to build a 100-megawatt reactor. Next he was taken to a uranium enrichment facility. "The first look through the windows of the observation deck into the two long high-bay areas was stunning," relates Mr. Hecker. "Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges all neatly aligned and plumbed below us."


Nor was that all. Mr. Hecker also writes that "The control room was astonishingly modern. Unlike the reprocessing facility and reactor control room, which looked like 1950s U.S. or 1980s Soviet instrumentation, this control room would fit into any modern American processing facility."


The North Koreans told Mr. Hecker they had developed all of this indigenously. I asked Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, both former nuclear-weapons designers and authors of "The Nuclear Express," an excellent history of nuclear proliferation, what they thought were the chances of that. Answer: "Zero."


What does this mean? For starters, it means that Pyongyang's nuclear efforts are not, or not merely, of the what-else-do-you-expect-from-these-nutcases variety. Some other entity—or regime—has made a considered decision to actively support the North's efforts to field an ambitious nuclear program. So who is it?


China's Gao Boxiong (left) and North Korea's Kim Jong Il celebrate their 60-year alliance against "imperialism."


Messrs. Reed and Stillman have their suspicions. Could it be Iran? Tehran, Damascus and Pyongyang have such a flourishing trade in nuclear know-how that it seems a good possibility, Various news outlets have noted the resemblance of the North's enrichment facility to the Iranian one in Natanz. But the authors are doubtful. "Not likely," they say. "[The Iranians] can't even make their own machines work."


What about Pakistan? "A possibility." The nuclear and ballistic missile trade between Pakistan and North Korea dates to the early 1990s, when Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan was perfecting his import-export model. Then, too, the centrifuges Mr. Hecker observed appeared to be of the second-generation, P-2 variety used by Pakistan.

Global View Columnist Bret Stephens explains why Iran's foreign minister doesn't want to talk to the US Secretary of State.


Yet the Islamabad-Pyongyang express was shut down years ago, while the North Korean facility appears to be brand new. It's unlikely that Pakistan would have been able to supply the large numbers of centrifuges the North has assembled. And then there's that state-of-the-art control room, probably not a Pakistani specialty. Which leaves China, the "most likely" provider of the North's new toys, according to the authors. "There is no possibility," they say, "of North Korea achieving what nuclear capability it has without Chinese help."

Mr. Stillman in particular knows whereof he speaks: He was among the first foreigners ever to visit China's nuclear-test base at Malan. In "The Nuclear Express," he and Mr. Reed note that beginning in 1982, the Chinese "decided to actively support nuclear proliferation in the Third World, specifically the Muslim and Marxist worlds. In the decade that followed, Deng's government then trained scientists, transferred technology, sold delivery systems, and built infrastructure in furtherance of that policy."

Why the government of Deng Xiaoping embarked on that very Maoist course remains a bit of a mystery. Yet embark it did: A.Q. Khan almost certainly obtained his first bomb blueprint from China, and China may also have been the site of Pakistan's first nuclear test in May 1990. In 1997, the CIA testified that "China was the most significant supplier of WMD-related technology to foreign countries."

In 2002 came news that Chinese experts had worked on Iran's nuclear facility in Isfahan. That same year, the Washington Times reported that a Chinese company had sold North Korea 20 tons of tributyl phosphate, a key ingredient for extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods. And thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that China facilitates North Korean weapons exports—over insistent U.S. protests—to sundry foreign destinations.

It's time the U.S. drew appropriate conclusions from this. Every effort to negotiate with the North has failed. Yesterday, President Obama called Hu Jintao to ask for help with Pyongyang. But as proliferation expert Henry Sokolski notes, what's the point of urging Beijing to be part of the solution when it's so willfully part of the problem? China has signed on to nearly every nonproliferation agreement around. Yet it continues to flout all of them.

This is not the behavior of a status quo power, but of a revolutionary one supporting activities and regimes that represent the most acute threat to global security. If it continues unchecked, it is China that should be sanctioned—and the North's facilities destroyed.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com