China Joins the Axis of Evil Pyongyang's nuclear program would have been impossible without Beijing.
Last month, U.S. nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker paid his fourth visit to North Korea, where he was granted a tour of some of the hermit kingdom's nuclear facilities. Think WikiLeaks is bad? Compared to what the former director of the Los Alamos lab saw, it's nothing.
Mr. Hecker was given a tour of a construction site where Pyongyang intends to build a 100-megawatt reactor. Next he was taken to a uranium enrichment facility. "The first look through the windows of the observation deck into the two long high-bay areas was stunning," relates Mr. Hecker. "Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges all neatly aligned and plumbed below us."
Which leaves China, the "most likely" provider of the North's new toys, according to the authors. "There is no possibility," they say, "of North Korea achieving what nuclear capability it has without Chinese help."
Mr. Stillman in particular knows whereof he speaks: He was among the first foreigners ever to visit China's nuclear-test base at Malan. In "The Nuclear Express," he and Mr. Reed note that beginning in 1982, the Chinese "decided to actively support nuclear proliferation in the Third World, specifically the Muslim and Marxist worlds. In the decade that followed, Deng's government then trained scientists, transferred technology, sold delivery systems, and built infrastructure in furtherance of that policy."
It's time the U.S. drew appropriate conclusions from this. Every effort to negotiate with the North has failed. Yesterday, President Obama called Hu Jintao to ask for help with Pyongyang. But as proliferation expert Henry Sokolski notes, what's the point of urging Beijing to be part of the solution when it's so willfully part of the problem? China has signed on to nearly every nonproliferation agreement around. Yet it continues to flout all of them.
This is not the behavior of a status quo power, but of a revolutionary one supporting activities and regimes that represent the most acute threat to global security. If it continues unchecked, it is China that should be sanctioned and the North's facilities destroyed.