Last week John Bolton remarked that the end game of the nuclear negotiations with North Korea was to replicate the “Libyan model.” Later, Bolton spelled out that what he meant was that all of North Korea’s nuclear devices should be turned over to us and “stored at Oak Ridge.” President Trump was unclear about whether he agreed or disagreed with this notion, or even if he understood what was being proposed. But let’s begin with a brief history of the Libyan nuclear program. (Much of this story can be found in the book Unclear Physics by Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer. The origin of this odd title for a book about the Iraqi nuclear program is that a secretary typing a memorandum had accidentally typed in the heading “Unclear” for “Nuclear.” Some of the participants in the program thought that this was an apt description.)
In thinking about Libya it is easy to forget that when Colonel Muammar Qaddafi took over the country on September 1, 1969, Libya (thanks to its oil revenues) was a wealthy country. As an example: In 1979 Libya gave the Pakistanis $133 million to help finance their nuclear weapons program.
What exactly Qaddafi expected to get from Pakistan is not clear. He certainly wanted a nuclear program of his own, although in the beginning Libya’s stated goal was nuclear power which would involve having reactors which could also produce plutonium. In 1977 a nuclear research center was created in Tajoura, near Tripoli. The problem then, and throughout the life of Libya’s program, was that of trained personnel. There were simply not enough Libyans who could do the work.
Instead, Libya imported trained personnel from places such as Egypt, but this proved an unreliable source of technical expertise as these workers could be recalled whenever political relations soured.
The International Atomic Energy Agency became active, trying to create courses of instruction so that Libya could grow its own crop of technically proficient workers, the IAEA found that the Libyans didn’t attend.
Unable to build their own, the Libyans tried to buy reactors. The Russians finally sold them a fairly small one, but I do not believe it ever produced an ounce of separated plutonium. The Libyans wanted a centrifuge program, but could never construct a single centrifuge.
Things changed in 1989 when the regime purchased what should have been a turn-key nuclear weapons program from the Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan. The Libyans did manage to use what they bought to create a cascade of nine centrifuges, but hey would have needed thousands in order to create enough fissile material. They also bought the design for a Chinese nuclear device.
On January 22, 2004 a vast amount of documents, plus one finished and one unfinished centrifuge, were transported by the CIA out of Libya. The centrifuges ended up, per Bolton, in Oak Ridge.
So that’s the Libyan model.
Unlike Libya, North Korea has perhaps as many as 40 completed nuclear devices. The North Koreans have thousands of centrifuges. They have functioning nuclear reactors. They have hundreds of technically-sophisticated and trained native personnel.
Are these—all of them—going to be sent to Oak Ridge? And even if we were to try to secure this vast array of materiel and personnel in Oak Ridge, how could we verify that we had all of it? Because nuclear devices themselves can easily be hidden.
I do not see what the end game of these negotiations is, but it cannot be the Libya model.
