WASHINGTON -- The Syrian facility destroyed in a 2007 Israeli air strike almost certainly housed a reactor being readied to produce nuclear-weapon material, an effort that the Middle Eastern state is not likely to resume, one expert said yesterday (see GSN, March 20).
(Apr. 7) -
International Atomic Energy Agency deputy chief Olli Heinonen speaks to reporters last June after returning from a nuclear inspection in Syria. One expert said yesterday that the Middle Eastern nation is not likely to resume its suspected nuclear-weapon program (Dieter Nagl/Getty Images).
"I think for the moment this program is really quite dead, not likely to be restarted," said Leonard Spector, head of the Washington office for the Monterey Institute's James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Spector spoke here on the first day of a nonproliferation conference organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on a panel that addressed several "nuclear crisis points" -- also including Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.
Syria, which joined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1969 as a non-nuclear-weapon state, is perhaps the most recent addition to that list.
Israel has not commented publicly on its reasons for eliminating the structure at al-Kibar in September 2007, but U.S. intelligence officials would later allege it was the core of Syria's attempts to establish itself as a nuclear-weapon state (see GSN, April 25, 2008).
Damascus denied that claim, and in the wake of the attack razed the site and built a new structure in the same location. It has allowed only one inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which found some evidence to support the assertion that the facility was a nearly finished reactor designed with help from North Korea to produce weapon-ready plutonium (see GSN, Nov. 19, 2008).
"From my point of view, there really wasn't too much doubt, based on the information provided by the CIA, and some of the information ... obtained by the IAEA, that this was indeed a nuclear-weapon program that Syria was embarked on," Spector said, citing "the style of the reactor, the secrecy with which it was built, the efforts to disguise its presence, [and] now we're hearing of some type of uranium on site."
Some audience members said the matter remained unresolved. The U.N. nuclear watchdog's investigation has been hampered by the attack, which eliminated the key piece of evidence, said Ambassador Taous Feroukhi of Algeria, current chairwoman of the IAEA Board of Governors.
"The board is still divided regarding Syria because there is no evidence that there is undeclared activity in that installation that has been destroyed," she said.
Her complaints echoed those of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who has said that Jerusalem and Washington should have shared their suspicions with his organization before the strike.
Even the CIA appears to have doubts, Spector said. The agency says the absence of a reactor fuel fabrication facility and a reprocessing plant at al-Kibar leaves it only "low confidence" that Syria sought a weapons capability. He argued, though, that the presence of processed uranium at the location indicates that Syria might have obtained reactor fuel from North Korea or another source, while Pyongyang has showed that a reactor can begin operations before a reprocessor comes online.
"The sequence here does not really push you away from the view that this was in fact a nuclear-weapon program," Spector said.
Panelist Ariel Levite, a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, noted that Damascus has blocked IAEA access to several other facilities: "They may be part of the mystery."
Syria had several reasons for wanting a nuclear-weapon program, according to Spector. By 1997, when discussions are believed to have begun with North Korea, Syria no longer enjoyed the patronage of the former Soviet Union and the political backing and access to weaponry that came with it, he said.
"The entire role of Syria in the Middle East was diminished, in part, because of this," Spector said. "There was also increasing fear of possible encirclement because of growing Israeli capabilities and the increasing presence of the United States in the region."
The "critical factor" was North Korea's willingness to assist then-Syrian leader Hafez Assad realize his ambitions for his nation, Spector said: "I think without that there could not have been a program."
Video taken inside the facility shows North Korean personnel and indicates that the plant itself appears to be modeled after the Stalinist state's plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon, U.S. officials have said. Washington has claimed that Pyongyang is no longer providing nuclear assistance to Damascus.
Lack of access to that expertise and the seeming elimination of the black market nuclear network once led by former top Pakistani atomic scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan is likely to prevent Syria from trying to build another reactor, Spector said.
Spector asked why the international community has not pressed the case on Syria as hard as it has other nations suspected of operating illicit nuclear programs. He then offered several possible answers to his own question.
Observers might be waiting for additional evidence, though little could be expected from the current level of access allowed by Syria, he said. Nations might also be reluctant to pressure Damascus as they try to diplomatically try to "woo" it back into the global community, Spector added.
"With the Israeli attack, the actual urgency, the danger that might have been posed by the evolution of the Syrian nuclear-weapon capability is no longer before us," he said.
Syria's nuclear program was the fourth to go undetected -- at least for some period of time -- in recent decades, Spector said, naming Iraq in the 1980s, Iran in the 1980s to 1990s and Libya early this decade as the others.
"These were failings of detection by the NPT-IAEA system," he said. "We know there are limits on what the IAEA can do, but certainly this is a very unhappy development."
The U.N. Security Council's inability to enforce nuclear rules, as shown in the cases of Iran and North Korea, "undoubtedly" played a role in Israel's decision to destroy the al-Kibar facility, according to Spector. He labeled the strike a "pure case" of the Bush administration's doctrine of preventive war to eliminate possible threats at an early stage.
"The fact that the international community has responded so cautiously to this event suggests that there may be increased tolerance for these kinds of activities in very, very specific circumstances involving a clandestine facility that appears to be oriented toward the production of nuclear weapons," Spector said.