In the history of nuclear weapons there has been only one country that voluntarily gave up its weapons and the program that produced them, and that is South Africa.
.. The South African program was unusual in several ways. It used a method of enriching uranium that had never been tried on an industrial scale, injecting hexafluoride gas at very high velocity into a tube to separate out the fissile bomb-making isotope, uranium 235.
.. South Africa had managed to manufacture six bombs and had one under construction when, in 1989
.. Libya is often cited as having given up its nuclear program. But it was an entirely different case.
.. Colonel Qaddafi bought a very expensive package of material from the Pakistani nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who ran an illicit nuclear proliferation network.
7 Big Things to Understand About Trump’s Talks With North Korea
2. Mismatched signals may have set up the talks to fail.
Usually, before high-level talks like these, both sides spend a long time telegraphing their expected outcomes.
Such signals serve as public commitments, both to the other side of the negotiation and to citizens back home. It’s a way for both sides to test one another’s demands and offers, reducing the risk of surprise or embarrassment.
.. North Korea has not publicly committed to anything. It has, quite cannily, channeled its public communications through South Korea, making it easier to renege.
.. Mr. Trump has declared “denuclearization” as his minimal acceptable outcome for talks, making it harder for him to accept a more modest (but more achievable!) outcome and costlier for him to walk away.
The table is now set in such a way that virtually any outcome is a win for North Korea, but only a very narrow and difficult range of outcomes will save the United States from an embarrassing failure.
The North Koreans can walk away more freely, while the Americans will be more desperate to come home with some sort of win. It’s a formulation that puts the Americans at significant disadvantage before talks even begin.
3. The sides do not agree on the point of talking.
.. “denuclearization” means vastly different things to the United States and North Korea.
.. North Koreans, she writes, tend to mean it as a kind of mutual and incremental disarmament in which the United States also gives up weapons.
Normally, the United States and North Korea would have issued months, even years, of public statements on their goals for direct talks, to clear all this up.
.. 4. The Trump administration has gotten the process backward.
It’s practically an axiom of international diplomacy that you only bring heads of state together at the very end of talks, after lower-level officials have done the dirty work.
Instead, the Trump administration is jumping straight to the last step... There is little obvious gain in skipping over a process that is intended to lock North Korea into public commitments, test what is achievable and ensure maximum American leverage and flexibility.
.. “Failed negotiations at the summit level leave all parties with no other recourse for diplomacy.”
.. 5. The State Department is in a shambles.
Wouldn’t this be a good moment to have an American ambassador to South Korea? Or an under secretary of state for arms control and international security?
Both posts are empty. The desk for assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs is occupied by a respected but interim official who has clashed with the White House. Her boss, the under secretary for political affairs, is retiring.
.. There will be fewer high-level diplomats to run parallel talks, fewer midlevel officials to assist and brief the president, fewer analysts to feel out North Korean intentions and capabilities.
.. conventional wisdom among analysts, as summed up by The Economist, is that “Mr. Trump — a man who boasts about his television ratings, and who is bored by briefings and scornful of foreign alliances — could end up being played like a gold-plated violin.”
.. 6. Everything could turn on the president’s personality.
.. It means that talks and their outcome will be determined, to an unprecedented degree, by Mr. Trump’s personal biases and impulses. By his mood at the time of talks. By his particular style of negotiation.
.. Mr. Kelly expressed concern over Mr. Trump’s “chaotic management style, erratic, moody personality and chronic staffing problems.”
He added, “That’s not ideology talking. I am a registered Republican and worked once for a G.O.P. congressman.”
- .. He has tended to oscillate unpredictably between policies, throwing talks over the budget or health care into chaos.
- He has set members of his own party against one another, weakening their position against Democrats. And
- he has offered the Democrats sweeping concessions on a whim, to the surprise of his party.
.. When legislative efforts have stalled, Mr. Trump has at times lashed out. In domestic politics, that can mean publicly denigrating his target or pressuring them to resign. In a heavily militarized standoff between nuclear powers, the stakes would be higher.
.. 7. North Korea has already achieved a symbolic victory.
.. For North Korea, high-level talks are a big win in their own right. Mr. Kim seeks to transform his country from a rogue pariah into an established nuclear power, a peer to the United States, a player on the international stage.
.. “Kim is not inviting Trump so that he can surrender North Korea’s weapons,” Jeffrey Lewis, a Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote on Twitter. “Kim is inviting Trump to demonstrate that his investment in nuclear and missile capabilities has forced the United States to treat him as an equal.”
Putin Unveils Nuclear Weapons He Claims Could Breach U.S. Defenses
Russia has developed nuclear weapons capable of penetrating U.S. defense systems, the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, said Thursday, sharpening rhetoric against the West and raising the prospect of a new arms race with Washington.
In language reminiscent of the Cold War, Mr. Putin used his annual state- of-the-union address to boast about Russia’s military prowess and show off a series of new armaments, including intercontinental ballistic missiles and underwater drones.
“Efforts to contain Russia have failed,” he said to Russia’s political elite gathered in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hal
.. Mr. Putin said would consider any nuclear attack on its allies an attack on Russia and would launch an immediate response
.. “Russia’s growing military might is a reliable guarantee of peace on our planet because it ensures the strategic balance in the world.”
.. The Trump administration has warned that Russia and China are moving to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals in a bid to “return to Great Power competition.”
.. The U.S., he said, had exploited Russia’s economic, political and military weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to ignore Moscow’s views, including by moving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization closer to Russia’s borders.
“No one listened to us. Listen to us now,”
.. Mr. Putin said the Syria campaign had allowed the military to show off the results of a modernization program he launched in 2011. “The whole world knows the names of our newest airplanes, submarines, air-defense systems,” he said.
.. Ivan Konovalov, an independent defense analyst in Moscow, said the speech demonstrated how quickly Russia’s arms industry is developing.
“It is developing some of the best weapons in the world, and the United States, if they want to maintain parity, has to answer the challenge quickly,” he said.
Hollywood Producer in the Spotlight in Netanyahu Probe
Israeli police said last month that they had questioned Mr. Milchan—who has financed Academy Award-winning movies such as “12 Years a Slave” and “Birdman”—about whether he gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifts in return for favors.
.. Mr. Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing. “It is allowed, according to the law, to accept presents from friends,” the prime minister said in response to questions at a January session of Israel’s parliament, after the probes were first reported publicly.
.. Mr. Milchan has had connections with several Israeli politicians over the years. Ehud Olmert, who later served as Israel’s prime minister, came up with “Pretty Woman” as the title for the 1990 film produced by Mr. Milchan, according to a 2011 biography, “Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan.”
.. Police are investigating whether Mr. Netanyahu in return lobbied former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for a visa for Mr. Milchan, Israeli media reported.
According to former U.S. officials, Mr. Netanyahu asked U.S. officials in 2014 to intervene at the State Department to renew a visa for Mr. Milchan.
.. In his role as an Israeli agent, Mr. Milchan helped procure equipment from the U.S. for Israel’s secret nuclear program, according to the biography, which said Mr. Milchan served as an officer for Israel’s now-defunct Bureau of Scientific Relations.
.. Mr. Milchan’s business partner in the U.S., Richard Kelly Smyth, was charged in 1985 with smuggling materials to Israel that could be used for nuclear purposes. Mr. Smyth was charged with breaking U.S. export laws and spent 16 years on the run before being convicted in 2002 and sentenced to 40 months in prison. Mr. Milchan wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing.