Forbes:
The agreement the U.S. is hammering out with Iran for downsizing Iran’s nuclear program seems to be leaving one wild card out of the deal. That’s North Korea’s long-term partnership with Iran on everything from missiles to nuclear technology and components.
While negotiators haggle over the number of centrifuges Iran should keep in its inventory, North Korean engineers, technicians and laborers remain in Iran assisting in constructing and operating the facilities that are the point of all the debate. South Korean intelligence sources estimate hundreds of North Koreans are in Iran as part of an exchange of nuclear know-how as well as missiles made in North Korea.
Whether North Korean can maintain the relationship with the same impunity with which it’s been dealing with Iran for more than 20 years is not clear. Sanctions, intensified by President Obama in early January after North Korean cyber warriors got into Sony Entertainment’s system, may have made it more difficult to ship Ro-dong and Scud missiles to Iran via Beijing, as the North had been doing for years.
Still, North Korea and Iran are believed to be exchanging critical stuff – North Korean experts and workers remaining in place while Iran sends observers to check out intermittent North Korean missile launches and see what North Korea is doing about staging a fourth underground nuclear explosion.
The nuclear exchange revolves around North Korea’s program for developing warheads with highly enriched uranium – with centrifuges and centrifuge technology in part acquired from Iran. At the same time, North Korea is able to assist Iran in miniaturizing warheads to fit on missiles – a goal the North has long been pursuing – and also can supply uranium and other metals mined in its remote mountain regions.
“North Korea continues to supply technology, components, and even raw materials for Iran’s HEU weaponization program,” says Bruce Bechtol, author of numerous books and studies on North Korea’s military and political ambitions. Moreover, he says, “They are even helping Iran to pursue a second track by helping them to build a plutonium reactor.”
That assessment supports the view of analysts that Iran is counting on North Korean expertise in constructing a reactor that produces warheads with plutonium. The reactor would be a more powerful version of the aging five-megawatt “experimental” reactor with which the North has built perhaps a dozen warheads at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, including three that it’s tested underground — in October 2006, May 2009 and February 2013, two years ago this month…
