Search Results for: david albright

April 29, 2008

David Albright, Call Your Office

CIA Director Michael Hayden said Monday that the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in September would have produced enough plutonium for one or two bombs within a year of becoming operational.  [AP, Pamela Hess]   And according to this report, the Syrian reactor was “nearing completion.” What Bruce Cumings is to North Korean history, David Albright is  to  North Korean proliferation. 

Categories Proliferation
April 8, 2007

Some Questions for David Albright (Which He Won’t Answer)

[Some Background for new readers: When the U.S. and North Korea signed a denuclearization agreement on February 13th, one of the major unresolved issues was the question of North Korea’s suspected uranium enrichment program. When U.S. diplomats confronted the North Koreans in 2002 with evidence suggesting the existence of that program, North Korea admitted, in effect, that it had a program and “so what of it?” The United States then declared North Korea in violation of the Agreed Framework of...

Categories Media Criticism/WMD
February 22, 2007

Richardson on David Albright: Put Me Down for “C”

Update: Albright has published his views here in slightly more detail, and I’m even less persuaded than I was before. Albright completely mischaracterizes the HEU evidence by ingoring evidence he can’t refute (North Korea’s admissions, Musharraf’s admissions, Libya) and arguing as if all of our evidence consisted of a receipt for aluminum tubes we’d found in A.Q. Khan’s lint filter. The key point about aluminum tubes is that they’re used to make gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. I’ve never seen...

Categories Appeasement/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/WMD
September 14, 2016

Sanctions talk with Steph Haggard; House hearings on N. Korea nukes & sanctions

In lieu of a full-length screed today, I’ll direct you to — a more refined list of my sanctions and policy recommendations in this post, by Stephan Haggard. for the sanctions geeks, the latest Treasury/FINCEN advisory, in which North Korea seizes the top spot from Iran as a money laundering risk. If nothing else, it’s a useful reminder that North Korean banks’ cutoff from the financial system — the single most important sanction yet imposed on North Korea — still hasn’t...

Categories Sanctions/Washington Views
May 11, 2015

Why a freeze deal with North Korea is a lose-lose proposition

Two weeks ago, almost no one thought we’d see Agreed Framework 3.0 before January 2017. The Obama Administration is politically weakened and out of time, its foreign policy is even less popular than its domestic policy, and it will need all of its energy to finalize an Iran deal acceptable to this Congress. Top administration officials were publicly skeptical about comparisons between North Korea and Iran, and saying that North Korea wasn’t serious about denuclearization. Last week, however, clear signs emerged that the administration is grasping...

Categories Anju Links
December 11, 2013

Open Sources, December 11, 2013

~ 1 ~ THIS COULD BE BIG, even if the conclusion seems exaggerated: Yonhap reports that North Korea is dumping gold in China, and calls it a sign of “imminent economic collapse.” Yonhap says the last time that happened was when Kim Jong Il died, but to me, it’s reminiscent of North Korea’s behavior after the Banco Delta Asia action froze their money. I wonder if this is because the purge of Jang disrupted their financial network. If so, it...

Categories Anju Links
October 23, 2013

Not all sanctions were created equal.

David Albright has questioned the conclusions of Josh Pollack, in a to-be-released academic paper, that North Korea has now acquired the ability to advance its nuclear weapons with indigenous technology, that the technological horse is out of the barn door, and that there’s nothing more that sanctions can do. (Implication: North Korea is a nuclear state, and we just have to live with that.) Only we really don’t know the exact parameters of what Pollack concludes, because (at least according to...

Categories Sanctions
October 26, 2012

Open Sources, October 26, 2012

I THINK THIS SAYS IT ALL: “This story may or may not be true.” ——————————————————- CAMP 22 UPDATE: The Daily NK reports on who it believes now occupies the camp, but I still have questions. ——————————————————- USFK TRIES TO REJOIN U.S. ARMY by expressing interest in joining off-peninsula exercises. And in other USFK news, I’m glad to see that Leon Panetta and Kim Kwang-Jin are putting some thought into how to respond to limited North Korean provocations, more than two...

Categories Anju Links
October 19, 2010

The Boy Who Cried “Sheep!”: One Man’s Mass Murderer Is Selig Harrison’s Reformer

For someone who judged the evidence of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program so skeptically, Selig Harrison sure doesn’t set a very high bar to perceive evidence of “reform” in North Korea. But Harrison’s latest op-ed in the Boston Globe is in equal parts breathless and baseless, and might just extend his dismal predictive record into the next decade. In his desperation to find some sign that North Korea’s new Inner Party is a hothouse of reforms, Harrison pounds the square...

Categories Humor/Satire/Kremlinology/The Camps/Useful Idiocy
October 5, 2010

At National Review, Mario Loyola takes up many of the themes I wrote about in my Capitalist Manifesto, and concludes that North Korea’s collapse is accelerating. I think a few of us have noticed that trend for an uncomfortably long time, but until the last two or three years, I couldn’t quite understand how those trends could continue this long without the termination of the regime. _______________________________ Open News has two interesting reports on one of the most important and...

Categories Uncategorized
March 4, 2010

4 March 2010: WaPo on North Korea and Burma

It may be almost as revealing as the White House’s concern about growing military (and nuclear?) cooperation between North Korea and Burma that David Albright, asked to comment by the Washington Post, takes a strikingly alarmist point of view about these new developments. Albright, you will recall, had said for years that the Bush Administration had inflated fears that North Korea had an undeclared uranium enrichment program. I don’t suppose that I will ever be in agreement with David Albright...

Categories Anju Links
March 2, 2010

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...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
February 2, 2010

DNI Releases Annual Threat Assessment

And it’s more bad news for the usual suspects — David Albright, Selig Harrison, and Mike Chinoy: After denying a highly enriched uranium program since 2003, North Korea announced in April 2009 that it was developing uranium enrichment capability to produce fuel for a planned light water reactor (such reactors use low enriched uranium); in September it claimed its enrichment research had “entered into the completion phase”. The exact intent of these announcements is unclear, and they do not speak...

Categories NK Military/Proliferation/Washington Views
January 11, 2010

We Can’t Trust North Korea, or the People Who Do

What is the objective of negotiating with North Korea at all? How you answer that question may depend on whether you believe North Korea cheated on the first Agreed Framework with Bill Clinton. Even before Clinton left office, the evidence that North Korea cheated by trying to build a uranium bomb was too compelling for any responsible president to ignore, yet during the last decade, true believers in diplomacy with Kim Jong Il invested themselves in denying that evidence and...

Categories Anju Links
January 6, 2010

Yes, Selig Harrison, North Korea Cheated

The revelations about North Korea’s highly enriched uranium program had already been falling like the snow on Seoul this week, and then I saw this: North Korea appears to have started a uranium enrichment program soon after it agreed in a 1994 deal with the U.S. to dismantle its existing plutonium nuclear weapons program, South Korea’s foreign minister said Wednesday. Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan’s remark, if accurate, suggests North Korea had no intention of giving up its atomic ambitions when...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Useful Idiocy
November 2, 2009

Yongbyon Reprocessing Plant “Restored to Its Earlier Conditions”

Who remembers the heyday of Agreed Framework II, when the foreign policy establishment united to educate the hoi polloi about all of the great unfolding achievements of diplomacy with the North Koreans? They told us that North Korea was removing fuel rods and dismantling in earnest.  Siegfried Hecker went to Yongbyon and returned to report, with a few qualifications, that “the DPRK leadership has made the decision to permanently shut down plutonium production” and that “the disablement actions taken to...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/WMD
September 14, 2009

Another Nuke Test?

On Saturday, I had coffee with a very well-connected South Korean friend, who suggested in passing that North Korea might respond to this-or-that sanction with another nuke test. After having expostulated for the next 45 seconds about why such a move wouldn’t further North Korea’s interests at this time, I think I now understand why my friend just sat there and smiled while I yammered on: According to a high-level source in North Korea, Kim Jong-Il instructed at the meeting...

Categories Proliferation/WMD
September 4, 2009

North Korea’s Uranium Enrichment: Raising the Stakes

Umm, about that North Korean uranium enrichment program the Bush Administration made up …. North Korea said Friday that it is in the final stages of enriching uranium, a process that could give the nation a second way to make nuclear bombs in addition to its known plutonium-based program. North Korea informed the U.N. Security Council it is forging ahead with its nuclear programs in spite of international calls to abandon its atomic ambitions, the official Korean Central News Agency...

Categories Proliferation/Propaganda/Subversion/WMD