ＥＥＥ会議（北朝鮮は何発核弾頭を持っているか）.....................................................................031015


北朝鮮の核兵器開発問題は、相変わらず藪の中で、果たして実際にはどの程度進んで
いるのか、情報は錯綜しているようです。米国のＣＩＡあたりは、北朝鮮自身が言う
ように、この数ヶ月間で８,０００本の使用済み核燃料の再処理を完了し、すでに
１，２発の核弾頭を製造したと見ているのに対し、国務省の専門家たちは、北がその
ような「はったり」を言う動機はたくさんあるが、それを実際に証明する証拠は何も
ないと述べております。他方国際原子力機関(IAEA)などはその中間で、２発程度の核
弾頭を作るのに十分なプルトニウムを入手している、という見方をしているようで
す。

いずれにしても、１９９３〜４年の時点ですでに１、２発持っているという見方が
あったわけですから、その点を加味すると現在ではやはり数発程度は持っているだろ
うと見るのが妥当だとも思われます。ただ、米国政府の諜報担当者たちは、イラクの
大量破壊兵器問題でミスジャッジをした（らしい）ということもあり、北朝鮮問題で
はかなり慎重になっている様子が窺えます。詳細は、以下のNew York Timesの記事
(10/14)でどうぞ。David Sangerという北朝鮮核問題で定評のある記者が書いたもの
です。
--KK

*****************************************************

Intelligence Puzzle: North Korean Bombs
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 14, 2003


WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 ? New intelligence estimates that North Korea may have
produced one or two nuclear weapons in recent months ? or perhaps more ?
have immersed the administration in another internal debate about the
quality of intelligence about illegal weapons.

With President Bush just days from embarking on his longest foray in Asia,
some of his advisers say it is possible that North Korea is telling the
truth about having turned 8,000 nuclear fuel rods into enough weapons-grade
plutonium for several warheads.

Others, including more cautious intelligence analysts at the State
Department, say there is still no proof, and plenty of incentive for the
North Koreans to bluff.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a series of confidential
briefings, has taken a middle view: It has told Asian governments that North
Korea has probably produced enough plutonium to make two new nuclear
weapons, according to officials who took notes on the briefings.

"When you add up the evidence, we have every reason to believe they've made
two new weapons," a senior Asian official said. That would be in addition to
the one or two that the C.I.A. has said the North probably made in the early
1990's.

American officials caution that the international agency reached its
estimates by reinterpreting data from the United States, South Korea and
other nations.

The international estimate concerned fuel and did not assess whether the
North could convert it into a working bomb. North Korea has never tested a
nuclear weapon. The C.I.A. assessment that North Korea built two bombs a
decade ago appears to assume that the country had mastered the technology,
but the basis for the conclusion is unclear.

Without fully embracing the international estimate, administration officials
say American analysts have concluded that the North has turned at least an
eighth of its nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium, and maybe as much
as a third.

What it all adds up to is that no one knows for certain how big the North's
arsenal is.

President Bush vowed earlier this year that he would never tolerate a
nuclear North Korea. But he has left deliberately ambiguous how he defines
"tolerate."

Charles Pritchard, who resigned this summer as the State Department special
envoy for North Korean nuclear issues, cast Mr. Bush's political and
strategic problem this way:

"We've gone, under his watch, from the possibility that North Korea has one
or two weapons to a possibility ? a distinct possibility ? that it now has
eight or more," said Mr. Pritchard, who also worked on North Korean issues
during the Clinton administration. "And it's happened while we were deposing
Saddam Hussein for fear he might get that same capability by the end of the
decade."

In June, evidence collected by American satellites and sensors that capture
a gas, krypton 85, released during reprocessing offered up tantalizing hints
that additional nuclear facilities exist. But intelligence officials were
unable to reproduce those findings, leaving what one senior official called
"a lot of suspicions, but zippo evidence."

The facilities are thought to be in the mountains toward the Chinese border,
and perhaps in underground tunnels, making them less vulnerable. "It's the
hardest intelligence target we have," one senior American official said,
"much harder than Iraq."

For Mr. Bush, that uncertainty greatly complicates his trip to Asia.

Mr. Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, said on Friday that Mr. Bush's
strategy had already "achieved important success," because the North has
"agreed to multilateral talks, six-country talks" on resolving the nuclear
issues.

The administration's strategy relies heavily on pressure from China, which
supplies the desperately poor North with most of its oil and much of its
food.

Yet as Mr. Bush heads to Asia, administration officials are trying to put
down a minor rebellion with a key ally over the strategy.

South Korea's foreign minister, Yoon Young Kwan, held a heated meeting with
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell last month in New York, demanding that
Mr. Bush respond to North Korea's call for security treaties and a plan for
gradual improvement in economic relations in return for dismantling any
nuclear facilities. In a twist that angered Mr. Powell, the South Korean
said his new president, Roh Moo Hyun, would not consider sending any troops
to aid in Iraq unless the United States gave ground on North Korea.

Mr. Powell, according to several officials familiar with the exchange,
curtly told told him, "That is not how allies deal with each other."

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Powell declined to discuss the
meeting. But, he said, "we have some ideas, some interesting ideas, about
how we can move forward on providing some security assurances to the North
Koreans that might open up some new possibilities" during Mr. Bush's trip.

Mr. Bush meets President Roh next week at an Asian summit meeting in
Bangkok, along with China's president, Hu Jintao, with whom the United
States has shared a tremendous amount of highly classified intelligence in
recent months about the progress of the North's program.

Unlike Iraq, North Korea is not denying its efforts, but rather boasting
with an enthusiasm that makes many analysts suspicious. Earlier this month
the North Korean government said it had solved "all of the technological
matters" for making weapons.

The debate over what is actually going on in some ways mirrors the arguments
that unfolded a year ago over how to interpret contradictory intelligence
about Iraq.

Hawks in the administration, from the White House to the vice president's
office to the Pentagon, argue that it is entirely possible that all 8,017
spent-fuel rods stored in North Korea since 1994 have been converted into
bomb fuel. They note that when the North last turned fuel rods into bombs,
in 1991, they went undetected by intelligence agencies for years.

Yet the Iraq experience has bred significant caution among intelligence
agencies, now more careful than ever about overinterpreting the evidence.
And, as in the case of the krypton gas, that evidence sometimes seems to
appear, then disappear.

"There are lots of ways for the North Koreans to scrub their facilities and
reduce the amount of krypton that gets out," said a former intelligence
official with long experience with the technology. "So measuring the gas
output is a crummy way of figuring out how much plutonium they have
produced."

Satellites have detected other suspected facilities, but that technology is
also not reliable.

"Our knowledge of North Korea is so limited that you have to sympathize with
the poor intelligence analysts who have to make sense of all this," said
Joel S. Wit, a former State Department official who visited a site five
years ago that the C.I.A. believed was a new reprocessor, only to find a
huge hole in the ground. "The ramifications of a screw-up are pretty big:
that you've missed a second facility, or that they have reprocessed and we
haven't picked it up. Either one of those is a pretty terrifying thought."