Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, wrote to Burma’s ruling military junta recently asking that it be allowed to visit alleged nuclear sites in Burma, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Friday that cited unnamed US officials.
The letter from IAEA Department of Safeguards chief Herman Nackaerts followed two other letters to Burma asking for “clarification of its alleged efforts to develop nuclear technologies at sites in the country’s north”, the journal reported, citing the US officials.
As Burma is a signatory to the UN nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the IAEA is allowed to request to see Burma’s alleged nuclear facilities. However, under international law, Burma can argue it has the right to deny such requests. The latest IAEA letter was sent after revelations contained in secret diplomatic cables released by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks that the US government was concerned about reports of Burma-North Korea nuclear co-operation. A cable read that the US embassy in Rangoon was told by a source that suspiciously large shipments in the north of the country were destined for a rumoured nuclear power plant under construction near Minbu in Magway Division.
The cables also revealed that Australian ambassador to Rangoon Michelle Chan was told last August by a Burmese government official “the Burma-DPRK [North Korea] connection is not just about conventional weapons. There is a peaceful nuclear component intended to address Burma’s chronic lack of electrical power generation”.
In a remarkable about-turn, a follow-up cable described how the source later told Chan there had been misunderstanding and that Burma was “in fact” not working with North Korea on a nuclear programme.
Responding to the apparent retraction, a cable written by a staff member of the US embassy in Rangoon last November concludes “Bottom line: GOB-DPRK [Government of Burma-Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea] co-operation remains opaque. Something is certainly happening; whether that something includes ‘nukes’ is a very open question which remains a very high priority for embassy reporting.”
The leaked cables also revealed that in 2004 the US embassy in Rangoon received reports that: “North Korean workers are reportedly assembling ‘SAM missiles’ and constructing an underground facility at a Burmese military site in Magway Division.”
Members of Burmese dictator Than Shwe’s entourage during a 2004 trip to New Delhi told the Indian government that they “wondered whether they would have to ‘go nuclear’ to get US attention”, a November 2004 US diplomatic cable released last week said.
The memo written by staff at the US embassy in Delhi quotes extensively from information relayed to the Americans from a senior Indian diplomat about Than Shwe’s October 2004 trip to the Indian capital.
Former IAEA director believes Burma likely involved in nuclear project
This past May, the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a news organisation in exile, released a documentary that featured the testimony of a defector who said Burma was pursuing both rocket and nuclear programmes. Defector Major Sai Thein Win, a former senior scientist in the Burmese military, had left the country with substantial documentation, which DVB then showed former IAEA director Robert Kelley.
Kelley wrote that information provided by the defector “suggests that Burma is mining uranium, converting it to uranium compounds for reactors and bombs, and is trying to build a reactor and or an enrichment plant that could only be useful for a bomb. There is no chance that these activities are directed at a reactor to produce electricity in Burma. This is beyond Burma’s engineering capabilities. It is up to Burma to notify the IAEA if these conditions have changed. Clearly, if it is trying to secretly build a bomb and is breaking these rules it will not be voluntarily notifying the IAEA”.
In June, after the airing of DVB’s report featuring Kelley, Burmese state media quoted from a letter written by Tin Win, Burma’s representative to the IAEA, informing the nuclear watchdog that: “No activity related to uranium conversion, enrichment, reactor construction or operation has been carried out in the past, is ongoing or is planned for the future.”
Former IAEA experts duel over alleged atomic programme
Kelley’s conclusions have been challenged by other nuclear experts including his former boss at the IAEA, Olli Heinonen. The former deputy director of the IAEA was featured in a recent 15-minute documentary on American public television that aired last month. The feature, a collaboration between PBS and not-for-profit investigative news organisation ProPublica, alleged that Kelley’s concerns about Burma’s nuclear programme were overblown.
Heinonen told ProPublica that despite the information provided by the defector and Kelley’s interpretation of the evidence from the defector, “There is no alarming factor triggering suspicions about nuclear weapons programmes at this stage.”
Several weeks after the airing of the documentary however Heinonen and ProPublica were forced to withdraw one of their key allegations against Kelley. An article accompanying the documentary on ProPublica’s website, co-authored by ProPublica’s managing editor Stephen Engelberg and Natan Dotan, quoted Heinonen dismissing Kelley’s supposed conclusion about a photo of a specialised “glove box”, because the process to make uranium metal needs very high temperatures and was unsuited for such a device. Heinonen was quoted saying: “When you look at the picture you see, for example, that the box has rubber gloves. You would not build a box with rubber gloves to do such a process.”
He said the operator would “burn his fingers literally”, adding: “I don’t think this box is for that purpose.”
The trouble with ProPublica’s apparent refutation of Kelley’s claim was that neither Kelley nor DVB actually claimed that the glove box would be used for the stage of the uranium metal processes that required high heat.
Kelley sent a scathing response to ProPublica, which said: “You claim that I said that a glove box could be used to make uranium metal. I said no such thing. Nuclear industrial chemistry is a highly technical field where precision and expertise is essential. For you to make such a stupid misquote, particularly given how easy it should’ve been to check this fact, is indefensible. The written record clearly shows it to be patently false. All my briefings show both the glove box and the bomb reactors and clearly differentiate them.”
Kelley also took a shot at his former boss: “You have Olli Heinonen on the record trying to figure out the difference between a bomb reactor and a glove box. Heinonen was the senior official at the IAEA responsible for directing the team assessing my accusations against Burma. He has not read the report well enough to know the difference between these two industrial uranium devices. Do not mix up my precise explanation in the report with his bumbling attempt to explain something I never said. He is your only ‘technical’ source to criticise me and he is lost in this topic. You have provided no credible source to say I am wrong.”
Following Kelley’s letter, ProPublica included a statement at the end of the article which downplayed their initial allegation against Kelley. ProPublica now claims that the article has been “clarified to more accurately paraphrase references to a device known as a ‘glove box’ in a report about possible Burmese nuclear weapons development by Robert Kelley.”
In the revised version Heionen was quoted saying that it would be “cumbersome” to use the “glove box”.
ProPublica claimed their reporter Dafna Linzer had asked unnamed sources inside the US government about Kelley’s report. She was quoted in the documentary as saying that the nuclear experts in the CIA and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) nuclear division who looked at the report found that “while Burma may have some nuclear work, it is not nuclear-weapons related”.
Next, the documentary shows ProPublica’s Engelberg confronting one of DVB’s funders with a rather bold assertion about Kelley’s report. Referring to the report, Engelberg claimed: “The first step that we did in terms of vetting it was to go to the American Intelligence Community, which takes frankly a very dim view of these allegations, are you aware of that?”
Kelley responded to this in his letter to ProPublica: “You claim that the CIA and DOE reviewed my report ‘line by line’ and rejected its findings. You put this information forward as if there is unanimity within the intelligence community in the USG [United States Government] about the report. Yet, senior officials of the Department of Energy intelligence unit who have done bomb reductions of uranium discussed my technical findings and agreed they are reasonable. In addition, IAEA experts agreed with me. Moreover, no one from these communities who read the whole report has challenged the technical evidence I present.”
Thai PM dismisses claims of Burma nuclear programme
The Bangkok Post reported on December 12 that Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva had downplayed reports that Burma was seeking a nuclear weapon. Abhisit was quoted as saying: “I can remember that Burma confirmed in an Asean-US summit that it wanted to see Asean as a nuclear-free region.”
The Oxford-educated Abhisit also claimed that none of the members of Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) wanted nuclear weapons in the area but that Thailand was always monitoring the nuclear issue for reasons of national security.
The following day the Bangkok Post shot back with an editorial scolding Abhisit, whom the paper generally supports politically.
“It was good of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to defend the Burmese government against yet another charge of secret nuclear projects. But Mr Abhisit’s attempt at rebutting the latest WikiLeaks memo on the subject was weak. He quoted statements by Burmese leaders, who hardly are good examples of openness and virtue. The six-year-old document from the US embassy in Rangoon certainly provided no proof that Burma has lied to the world about its nuclear ambitions. Neither did Mr Abhisit’s good-natured trust of propaganda statements from the military junta.”
