Bush Faces Many Obstacles on Iran, North Korea
August 10, 2003
The Associated Press
Tom Raum
The Bush administration's use of discredited intelligence on Iraqi weapons may complicate America's ability to deal with more tangible nuclear dangers across the Middle East and in Asia.
The recent nuclear activity by North Korea and Iran and the broader issue of keeping mass-killing weapons away from terrorists loom as the biggest foreign policy challenges after the Iraq war.
Yet administration critics suggest President Bush's hand is weakened by credibility issues over assertions before the war about Iraq's nuclear and other weapons capabilities.
"What happens now when we need to rally the world about the weapons programs in North Korea and Iran? How likely are they to believe the detail of what we present to them?" asks Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The administration is pinning its hopes on diplomacy as the way to contain Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions. The United States also is looking toward the same international weapons inspection apparatus that it spurned in Iraq.
The issue is not only whether the two remaining nations in Bush's "axis of evil" are building atomic bombs, but also how their neighbors would react.
For instance, North Korea's testing of a nuclear device might persuade Japan to quickly go nuclear itself, arms-control experts suggest. A nuclear Japan, in turn, might force China to increase its arsenal. That could put pressure on Taiwan to seek such weapons.
A nuclear Iran, meanwhile, could make it harder to establish pro-American governments in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tehran's possession of the bomb could trigger an arms race between Iran and Israel. Israel might feel compelled to try to take out an Iranian nuclear plant -- as it did an Iraqi facility in 1981.
Israel has never confirmed being a nuclear power, but it is widely believed to have as many as 100 to 200 such weapons.
Then there are nuclear club members India and Pakistan.
"India has dozens of nuclear weapons and is actively pursuing a long-range missile program to enable them to target not simply Pakistan but also China," said John Pike, a military analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, a consulting group based in Arlington, Va.
"Pakistan's nuclear program and missile program has basically been developed in close concert with Iran and North Korea. You might even think of it as one program doing business at three locations," he added.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said Pakistan and India "are on a hair trigger that is even finer and shorter than the one that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War."
"Yet there has been very little attention focused by U.S. policy-makers or the international community on a systematic, comprehensive approach to reducing risks in that region," Kimball said.
Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, is an important ally in the U.S.-led fight against terrorism. That makes it harder for the administration to press its accusations that Pakistan helped North Korea's nuclear-arms program in return for missile parts.
Bush, vacationing this month in Texas, is hoping that diplomacy and pressure from neighboring powers will help defuse the nuclear threats in both Iran and North Korea.
The best course on Iran is "to convince others to join us in a clear declaration that the development of a nuclear weapon is not in their interests," Bush said.
As to North Korea, Bush hopes its agreement to meet for six-nation talks on its nuclear programs will lead to the country's renunciation of nuclear weaponry.
"We are making progress," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said late last week. "It's a tough regime to deal with. ... But we're fairly sanguine that if you're going to get this done, it's going to have to be in coordination with other states."
But uncertainties abound.
North Korea last week balked at the makeup of the U.S. delegation to the six-nation talks. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami pledged not to give up a nuclear program he insisted was designed to produce electrical energy, not atomic bombs.
Whereas the first nuclear powers were major players on the world stage -- the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China -- the emerging nuclear powers are poorer, generally less stable governments.
That fact, and the chance that nuclear materials could wind up in the hands of terrorist groups, worries arms-control experts and administration officials.
Washington's hope is "that somehow diplomatically we can work our way through this issue," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"The notion or the thought" that nuclear material "could be proliferated to other countries could change our security environment in a not-so-nice a way," Myers said.
EDITOR'S NOTE -- Tom Raum has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1973, including five presidencies.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/08/09/national1234EDT0511.DTL