Did North Korea Ship Yellowcake to Syria?

Say it with me: thank God Chris Hill came along in time to keep us safe:

Syria in 2007 received approximately 45 tons of raw uranium from North Korea for use in producing fuel for a secret nuclear reactor, informed military and diplomatic sources told Kyodo News on Saturday (see GSN, Feb. 26). An Israeli air assault destroyed the undeclared reactor not long after Syria received shipment of the material and the “yellowcake” uranium is thought to have been sent to Iran in summer 2009, a Western diplomatic source said. A Middle East military source, however, says that Damascus might actually have sent the uranium back to North Korea following the Israeli attack.

The incident draws attention to Pyongyang’s proliferation of nuclear material and raises the question of whether Iran might enrich the received uranium, according to Kyodo. Forty-five tons of yellowcake could be converted into 196 to 287 pounds of bomb-grade uranium, according to Institute for Science and International Security President David Albright. “In any case, 45 tons of yellowcake is enough for several nuclear bombs,” he said (Kyodo News/iStockAnalyst.com, Feb. 28). [Global Security, via NTI]

See also Mainichi News. Around the time of the Israeli strike known as Operation Orchard, there were persistent and still-unconfirmed reports that North Korea had shipped “nuclear material” to Syria, possibly using a mysterious ship that landed in the Syrian port of Tartus.

Me: this certainly doesn’t sound conclusive, but it’s worthy of further investigation. It’s also a vivid illustration of why you have to be stoned to think North Korean proliferation is a problem we can just ignore away. Even if this particular report isn’t true, we have to be worried all the time that North Korea will sell anything to anyone. One shudders at the thought of what they’ve already sold that we don’t know about.