The Al Kibar nuclear reactor in Syria
As someone who voiced great skepticism about the initial claims that Israel destroyed a nuclear facility in the Syrian desert on September 6, 2007, I’ll be the first to admit that the evidence provided in the DNI background briefing presents proof that Syria was in fact close to completing the construction of a Calder-Hall type of nuclear reactor producing plutonium. The evidence of North Korean involvement is not quite as compelling but there doesn’t seem much reason to doubt it. (Nearly all the information that follows comes courtesy of Arms Control Wonk.)
Here’s the video:
All in all, in terms of intelligence, this looks like an open and shut case — with one noteworthy exception: In the intelligence briefing a senior intelligence officer when asked about evidence of a Syrian nuclear weapons development program said this:
To go with the question you’re asking – weapons – we said, we believe it. There’s no other reason for it. But our confidence level that it’s weapons is low at this point. We believe it, but it’s low based on the physical evidence.
In other words, the physical evidence gathered indicated that Syria had built a nuclear reactor that, once operational, would have been capable of producing plutonium. There was no evidence that the reactor had been built to produce electricity and neither was it deemed suitable to be a research facility. The production of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons was thus inferred in the absence of any other plausible explanation.
The next point worth noting is that the decision to bomb the facility was Israel’s:
Q: Would the U.S. have considered any kind of activity had the Israelis not?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: We obviously were looking very closely at options, and we had looked at some approaches that involved a mix of diplomacy and the threat of military force with the goal of trying to ensure that the reactor was either dismantled or permanently disabled, and therefore never became operational.
We looked at those options. There were, as I mentioned to you, conversations with the Israelis. Israel felt that this reactor posed such an existential threat that a different approach was required. And as a sovereign country, Israel had to make its own evaluation of the threat and the immediacy of the threat, and what actions it should take. And it did so.
The unanswered questions at this point nearly all seem to be political. Such as:
1. Why did the US government back Israel in a military action that totally undermines the authority and value of the IAEA?
2. Why has the intelligence been released now?
3. What impact should this have on any agreement reached with North Korea?
