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On Aug. 27, the U.S. will join China, Russia, North Korea, Japan and South Korea in negotiations in Beijing over how best to neutralize the North Korean nuclear threat. One country that won't be represented but that's sure to be watching is Iran.
Earlier this summer, I attended a meeting in Geneva that included Tehran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and several members of Iran's Expediency Council. After the formal session, they pulled me aside. The one question -- the only question -- they pressed me about was what Washington planned to do about North Korea.
Since then, Iranian diplomats have been consulting European officials. Tehran has begun developing a grand negotiated nuclear bargain of its own.
The stakes are high. If, like North Korea, Iran succeeds in getting the world to accept its nuclear program and is allowed to finish its nearly completed "peaceful" light water reactor (which after little more than a year of operation can make over 50 bombs worth of near weapons-grade plutonium), its neighbors are sure to follow suit.
Saudi Arabia, who helped bankroll Pakistan's bomb project and has medium-range rockets of its own, has already had officials visit Islamabad's bomb factory in Kahuta. There's even been talk about Pakistan loaning some of its nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia, keeping them under Pakistani control (like the U.S. does with its weapons in Germany). Egypt and Syria, meanwhile, are planning nuclear desalinization plants (i.e., big reactors producing material which could be used for nuclear weapons).
Algeria, which was caught in 1991 covertly developing a reactor that might make bombs, now has it on line. Finally, Turkey, a close friend to Israel, has made it clear that Iran going nuclear would force Ankara to secure new "security assurances." Like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, which have either tried or considered producing nuclear weapons, all of these nations have or could quickly acquire nuclear-capable missiles.
This is not a world the U.S. and its allies want. They probably could identify adversaries and friends in it. But it would be possible only to form a vague idea of how well-armed they might be. And friends, when called upon, would be more inclined to go their own way. Too much would be reminiscent of 1914 but with one big difference -- an increasing number of conflicts would be spring-loaded to go nuclear.
What must the U.S. do to avoid this? How can it convince Iran and the others that violating their nuclear nonproliferation pledges is a bad idea?
First, it would help if Washington was clearer about its own view of North Korea -- the most egregious violator of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Certainly, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton was lucid enough when he spoke in Seoul on July 31. "To give in to [Kim Jong Il's] extortionist demands," Mr. Bolton noted, "would only encourage him, and perhaps more ominously, other would-be tyrants around the world."
He went on to explain that the best way to bolster upcoming six-way talks, was to have the U.N. Security Council take up the IAEA's six-month old violation report to the council and identify North Korea as an NPT outlaw. This would at least dispel the fiction Pyongyang is promoting that it should be treated as an equal by the other parties to the negotiations (which the IAEA has not found to have violated the treaty). Mr. Bolton also highlighted U.S. President George W. Bush's global strategic weapons technology interdiction effort, the Proliferation Security Initiative. Top on every participating nation's target list for this effort, he noted, was North Korea and Iran.
Mr. Bolton's points angered North Korea, which depicted him as "human scum." The White House, in turn, backed Mr. Bolton, saying he spoke for the administration. This support, however, was soon downgraded. Earlier this month at the U.N. m
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