RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
Seven months ago, Israeli war planes bombed a remote complex in the desert of Syria. That news was followed by silence from the Bush administration until yesterday when senior intelligence officials went to Capitol Hill to say that the mystery building was a nuclear reactor being built with the help of North Korea. And they brought photos to back up their claims. NPR's Tom Gjelten has more.
TOM GJELTEN: It's hardly a secret that Syria has long turned to North Korea for military help. North Korean Scud missiles have been part of the Syrian arsenal for many years. But the Bush Administration now says North Korea helped Syria build a nuclear reactor. In briefings yesterday, intelligence officials said they think the Syrian reactor was built to make plutonium for a nuclear weapons program. To back up those claims, the Bush administration prepared a DVD, including photographs said to have been taken by a spy inside the Syrian facility. The interior photographs suggested the structure was indeed a nuclear reactor similar to one in Yongbyon, North Korea.
(SOUNDBITE OF DVD)
MONTAGNE: This photograph shows the top of the reactor vessel in the reactor hall.
GJELTEN: The DVD complete with narration was played yesterday for members of Congress and later for reporters.
(SOUNDBITE OF DVD)
MONTAGNE: Note the similar arrangement of vertical tube openings in the top of the Syrian reactor on the left and North Korea's Yongbyon plutonium production reactor on the right.
GJELTEN: The intelligence officials estimated that North Korea's nuclear cooperation with Syria began more than a decade ago. The DVD presented some supporting evidence of the Syria-North Korea ties.
(SOUNDBITE OF DVD)
MONTAGNE: We obtained this photograph for example showing the head of North Korea's nuclear reactor fuel manufacturing plant in Yongbyon together in Syria with the head of the Syria Atomic Energy Commission.
GJELTEN: The photograph is of two men posing cheerfully on a city street. A car in the background has Syrian license plates. The North Korean man is known to U.S. diplomats who have met with him during the ongoing international talks over North Korea's nuclear program. The intelligence officials acknowledged they lack definitive evidence for their conclusion that the Syrian reactor was built as part of a nuclear weapons program, but they said there was no other obvious purpose for the reactor because it was ill-suited for research and not configured to produce electricity. They also pointed out that Syria kept its construction secret in violation of international treaty commitments to declare all nuclear related activity. In a statement yesterday, the Syrian Embassy in Washington said it utterly denies the Bush administration's allegations saying they were made to misguide the U.S. Congress. Nuclear expert Joseph Cirincione from the Ploughshares Fund says the Administration makes a good case that the Syrian facility was in fact a nuclear reactor, but he says that hardly means the Syrians were on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb.
MONTAGNE: They may have decided they want to create a piece of a nuclear weapons program, a reactor, but that's just one piece. You really need quite a large complex to be able to burn the fuel and create plutonium and then you need it very large and difficult to construct facility to handle the fuel and extract the plutonium from it. So the reactor alone doesn't give them weapons capability.
GJELTEN: Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
MONTAGNE: And you can see the video evidence released to reporters at npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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