Syria, North Korea were near nuclear bomb production

Sara Carter and Nicholas Kralev of the Washington Times writes this morning thatthe Administration was convinced that Syria, with the help of North Korea were nearing completion of the facility before Israel bombed it last year;

The Bush administration is set to tell Congress today that a nuclear facility in Syria built with North Korean help was nearly complete when Israel bombed it in September, but that Pyongyang has not provided any further nuclear assistance to the hard-line Arab nation, at least at that site, U.S. officials said.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and other intelligence officials are expected to brief several congressional committees in closed-door sessions, breaking the administration’s silence on the issue. The facility has become a major issue in six-nation negotiations to end the North’s nuclear programs.

“The belief is that the reactor was nearing completion,” said one official familiar with the content of the briefings. “It would have been able to produce plutonium.”

The Washington Post provides more details. Apparently an Israeli informant video taped North Koreans inside the facility;

A video taken inside a secret Syrian facility last summer convinced the Israeli government and the Bush administration that North Korea was helping to construct a reactor similar to one that produces plutonium for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, according to senior U.S. officials who said it would be shared with lawmakers today.

The officials said the video of the remote site, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, shows North Koreans inside. It played a pivotal role in Israel’s decision to bomb the facility late at night last Sept. 6, a move that was publicly denounced by Damascus but not by Washington.

Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core’s design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows “remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon,” a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video “very, very damning.”

It also explains why Syria never complained much about the bombing – much less that the Sudanese complained about their aspirin factory getting cruise-missiled. Who knows what kind of crap Hezbollah would be firing into Israel today if production has continued.

Category: Foreign Policy, Terror War