According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), North Korea's arsenal of chemical weapons may include blister agents such as mustard gas and lewisite, the choking agents phosgene and diphosgene, the vomiting agent adamsite, cyanide in the blood agents, and nerve agents such as VX, sarin, tabun and soman.
Much less is known about its biological-weapons agents, but according to reports by prominent defectors from North Korea, its industries have experimented with bacteria and viruses for anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, typhoid fever, typhus, tuberculosis, smallpox, and yellow fever.
The IISS also states in a report dated January 2004 that, although its is difficult to determine exactly what kind of chemical and biological munitions have been stockpiled, "North Korea is capable of using a variety of delivery systems to disseminate chemical agents, including artillery, multiple rocket launchers, mortars, aerial bombs and missiles."
By Bertil Lintner
BANGKOK - A key step in the solution to the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula may be in sight as the North Korean Foreign Ministry said on Monday that it is ready to shut down the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon north of Pyongyang as soon as its funds in a Macau bank, which have been frozen since late 2005, have been released.
But even if that happens, North Korea will still have an impressive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). According to USNorth Korea expert Joseph S Bermudez, the country at present "produces indigenously, and possesses the capability to effectively employ throughout the Korean Peninsula, significant quantities of chemical weapons".
North Korea is also believed to have stockpiled significant quantities and varieties of biological weapons, which, together with chemical weapons, are often referred to as "the poor man's atomic bomb". If deployed in warfare, they can be as devastating as a nuclear device.
And, unlike nuclear reactors that can be easily detected by satellites, North Korea's chemical- and biological-weapons facilities are mostly underground. Furthermore, it is not difficult to obtain dual-use chemicals - components with military as well as civilian applications, the sale of which is not necessarily restricted by international agreements and control regimes.
North Korea's front companies in the region - primarily, it seems, in Thailand - are supplying the regime in Pyongyang with vital ingredients for its defense industries.
According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), North Korea's arsenal of chemical weapons may include blister agents such as mustard gas and lewisite, the choking agents phosgene and diphosgene, the vomiting agent adamsite, cyanide in the blood agents, and nerve agents such as VX, sarin, tabun and soman.
Much less is known about its biological-weapons agents, but according to reports by prominent defectors from North Korea, its industries have experimented with bacteria and viruses for anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, typhoid fever, typhus, tuberculosis, smallpox, and yellow fever.
The IISS also states in a report dated January 2004 that, although its is difficult to determine exactly what kind of chemical and biological munitions have been stockpiled, "North Korea is capable of using a variety of delivery systems to disseminate chemical agents, including artillery, multiple rocket launchers, mortars, aerial bombs and missiles."
North Korea's chemical-weapons research began in 1954 when Pyongyang, in the wake of the Korean War, established a directorate called the Chemical Bureau to develop a defense against chemical weapons as well as to provide doctrinal provisions for deployment of chemical-warfare troops. Each airfield in North Korea was provided with decontamination equipment and detection systems derived from Soviet and Chinese designs, and partly supplied by those two countries.
In 1961, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung issued a "Declaration of Chemicalization", which called for greater efforts to develop chemical-production facilities. As a result, the IISS report says, North Korea developed the capability to produce "a number of dual-use chemicals such as compounds of phosphate, ammonium, fluoride, chloride and sulfur that could be diverted from civilian chemical uses to support a chemical-weapons program".
In 1981 - 20 years after Kim Il-sung's declaration - the Chemical Bureau was transformed into the Nuclear Chemical Defense Bureau and placed under the direct control of the General Staff Department of the Ministry of the People's Armed Forces. Its mandate was extended to include the management and development of defensive measures in the event of nuclear, biological and chemical attacks.
In recent years, North Korea is known to have sent personnel from this bureau to Russia, Ukraine, France and Austria to study nuclear facilities in those countries, and to procure equipment necessary for its own WMD program.
North Korea has not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and is not expected to do so, as it requires intrusive inspection and verification, which the authorities in Pyongyang would never accept. Since 1997, the South Korean government has insisted that the North join the CWC, but to no avail.
On the other hand, North Korea did in 1987 accede to the Biological Toxin and Weapons Convention - although an open press release in the early 1990s referred to "military biotechnology work" at numerous medical institutes and universities in the country.
The production of chemical weapons reportedly takes place in the Ganggye Chemical Weapons Factory in Chagang province and in the Sakchu Chemical Weapons Factory in North Pyongan. Both factories - which consist mostly of underground facilities - are controlled by the Equipment Department of the Nuclear Chemical Defense Bureau. Chemical weapons are field-tested on islands in the Yellow Sea, off the coast of northwestern North Korea. Causeways link some of those islands with the mainland - but no buildings can be seen on them from the air.
But there is no credible evidence to back up a claim by South Korean and other activists that political prisoners have been usedas human guinea pigs to test chemical weapons. One of the worst - and clumsiest - examples of an attempt to show such evidence was provided in early 2004 by the otherwise well-respected British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) in a documentary called Access to Evil, which was shown in several countries.
Over the years, several refugees have reported that political prisoners are used for vivisection experiments, to test newsurgical techniques, and new medicines and other chemical agents. The BBC film claimed that the smoking gun had been found: a "letter of transfer" from the local State Security Agency of a labor camp called "Camp 22" saying, "The above person is transferred to the security agency ... for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons." The letter included the test subject's name, sex, date of birth, place of birth, and place of residence.
Camp 22, which is also called Hoeryong after the North Hamyong county where it is located, is indeed a well-known labor camp that even many outsiders have heard about. The document was marked "Top Secret", and was signed by an official. It also had a stamp affixed to it from the State Security Agency. But critical eyes - among them Yonhap, South Korea's official news agency, which is not noted for being sympathetic to the North - immediately noted that the printed text on the document appeared faded while the text written in pen was much less damaged.
The paper was not of the type normally used in North Korea, and Yonhap, as well as other South Korean sources, also pointed out that the direct translation of the agency in question that had been stamped the document was "the National Protection Division" or, in Korean, the Kukga-bowi-bu.
Between 1982 and 1993, that was the correct name of the agency in charge of, among other things, the country's labor camps. The problem was that this letter was dated "February 13, 91 Juche", or 2002, nine years after the name of the agency had been changed to National Security Protection Division, or Kukga-anjeon-bowi-bu.
South Korea's intelligence agencies reached the conclusion that the letter was most probably written, or dictated, by a North Korean refugee who had fled before 1993 and therefore was unaware of the name change.
It was, of course, not entirely impossible that the person who signed the order had used an old stamp. But in strictly controlled North Korea, where every civil servant is afraid of making mistakes, that was deemed extremely unlikely by South Korean sources.
In combination with other discrepancies in the documentation, it became quite clear that the question whether political prisoners have been used in experiments with biological and chemical weapons remains unanswered. But any attempt to find out the truth has been severely hampered by the BBC's highly dubious report.
What is known, however, is that North Korea has bought, or has tried to buy, large quantities of sodium cyanide from China, Thailand and Malaysia. This toxic chemical can be used to make sarin nerve gas - or to manufacture fertilizer, or in industrial plating. North Korea is also known to have been shopping for phosphorus pentasulfide, a key ingredient in VX, a nerve agent that was invented in Britain in the 1950s.
On September 25, 2004, the South Korean Customs Service submitted a report to a lawmaker from the Grand National Party stating that South Korea had exported 73,925 tons of sodium cyanide to China and 3,540 tons to Malaysia since 1998. In both cases, some of the chemicals were reportedly re-exported to North Korea.
At the time, Malaysian authorities declined to name the Malaysian company that had acted as a middleman for North Korea. They only said they were "looking into an allegation that a Malaysian company had ... shipped some 40 tons of the chemical substance, of which 15 tons came from South Korea". A total of 107 tons was alleged to have been shipped to North Korea via Chinese middlemen.
Since that incident in 2004, there have been no further reports of chemicals reaching North Korea via Malaysian middlemen or Malaysia-based companies.
In 2003, following a tip-off from South Korean intelligence, the Thai customs authorities blocked a North Korea-bound shipment of sodium cyanide - but otherwise Thailand appears to have become North Korea's main base for the procurement of dual-use chemicals.
According to the Thai Customs Department's official website, North Korea imported 12.9 million baht's (US$370,000) worth of phosphinates in 2006, which can be used as inoffensive anti-static coatings on polyethylene - and for pre-treatments against nerve-agent intoxication. North Korea also bought 844,221 baht's ($25,000) worth of sodium peroxide from Thailand, which can be used to bleach wood pulp for the production of paper - or to recycle plutonium from refractory residues.
Take your pick: the North Koreans have become masters in dealing in dual-use products, which makes it almost impossible to prevent sensitive materials from reaching Pyongyang's defense industries.
But there is also reason to be cautious. Hazel Smith, a British professor and a senior program officer at the United Nations University in Tokyo, wrote in the March 2004 issue of the highly respected Jane's Intelligence Review: "Recent inquiries in the US and the UK into alleged intelligence failures regarding the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have highlighted shortcomings in the way information is used and conclusions are drawn by Western intelligence agencies. There is a danger that the same errors could be repeated in North Korea."
Most evidence, however, suggests very strongly that North Korea possesses both a chemical- and a biological-weapons program, although, as the IISS states in its report, "they may differ in terms of scope and state of advancement". But North Korea's record of half a century of known research - and documented evidence of the procurement of dual-use chemicals - cannot be ignored. And, if pressed hard by outside forces, it may not hesitate to use its "poor man's atomic bomb".
Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services.
