By Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow for Non-proliferation
For those who insist on assessments based on facts rather than inference and un-confirmable claims by anonymous officials, the body of factual information about Israel's September 6 attack on a Syrian military facility provides very thin gruel.
We know with certainty only that the facility north of the village of al-Tibnah bore some resemblance to the North Korean "research" reactor at Yongbyon (similar length and width but dissimilar height and lacking cooling tower and chimney), that it had an apparent pumping station and that it had been under construction since 2002.
Perhaps by no coincidence, the CIA soon thereafter, in the January-June 2003 version of its biannual report to the US Congress sharpened its public assessment of Syria's WMD-related technology acquisition to say: "we are looking at Syrian nuclear intentions with growing concern." Previous CIA reports had said only that US intelligence was monitoring Syria's nuclear research and development program for any signs of weapons intent. Another relevant fact is that Syria razed the facility soon after the attack. This cover-up complicates any future on-the-ground assessment and confirms that Syria had something to hide--although what country does not? The best guess is that it was a reactor under construction but this is still only a hypothesis.
Claims of North Korean involvement are easy to believe but even harder to substantiate with concrete information. Pyongyang was the first and one of the only countries to criticize the Israeli incursion of Syrian airspace, but it is not uncommon for Pyongyang to issue such condemnations. Rumors that North Korean personnel were killed in the attack have not been confirmed. Nor is there any corroboration to claims that the North Korean Namchongang Hi-Tech Engineering Service Company had an office in Syria involved in nuclear-related commerce, although it is known that dozens of North Korean missile experts have been stationed in Syria in connection with North Korea's Scud missile sales.
The International Atomic Energy Agency is usually the best source of unbiased information on nuclear proliferation claims. Yet the agency has been totally shut out, both by Syria, which could have asked for an IAEA assessment to prove that there was nothing nuclear-related at al-Tibnah, and by Israel and the US, which could have asked the IAEA to investigate their suspicions of undeclared nuclear work. Syria would not have been legally obliged to agree to an IAEA inspection request, but failure to notify the IAEA of a reactor under construction would be a safeguards violation under the new conditions for pre-notification of facilities promulgated by the IAEA Board of Governors in 1992.
If the bombed facility were a reactor under construction, it would not have presented a direct proliferation threat for several years, and then only if Syria also had access to a reprocessing facility to separate out weapons-usable plutonium from the irradiated fuel. Reprocessing plants are hard to hide, and the satellite imagery of al-Tibnah does not show anything resembling such a facility. Clandestine work elsewhere on reprocessing certainly is not out of the question, but Syria is not known to have nuclear expertise or infrastructure that would lend itself to this purpose.
Unless there is much more to the story than is known to date, it is reasonable to conclude that Israel's September 6 attack was not conducted to forestall an imminent Syrian nuclear weapons threat. If preemption was the motive, it could be that the target was material of potential use in a dirty bomb that could find its way into terrorist hands. It is more likely, however, that Israel attacked the al-Tibnah facility for a combination of strategic and political reasons. If so, Israel sent unmistakable warnings simultaneously to: Syria, that any attempt to develop a clandestine nuclear capability will be discovered and destroyed; North Korea, that it should not even think about nuclear cooperation with Israel's enemies; Iran, that Israel has both the will and the capability to destroy nuclear facilities that it judges to be threatening; and the major powers of the world, to take care of the Iran nuclear problem before Israel is compelled to take matters into its own hands.
If those messages were received, Israel will have killed four birds with one stone.-
Mark Fitzpatrick is senior fellow for non-proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
