NYtimesMarch 1, 2011
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — In late 2009, the Obama administration was leaning on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his son Seif to allow the removal from Libya of the remnants of the country’s nuclear weapons program: casks of highly enriched uranium.
Meeting with the American ambassador, Gene A. Cretz, the younger Qaddafi complained that the United States had retained “an embargo on the purchase of lethal equipment” even though Libya had turned over more than $100 million in bomb-making technology in 2003. Libya was “fed up,” he told Mr. Cretz, at Washington’s slowness in doling out rewards for Libya’s cooperation, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.
Today, with father and son preparing for a siege of Tripoli, the success of a joint American-British effort to eliminate Libya’s capability to make nuclear and chemical weapons has never, in retrospect, looked more important.
Senior administration officials and Pentagon planners, as they discuss sanctions and a possible no-flight zone to neutralize the Libyan Air Force, say that the 2003 deal removed Colonel Qaddafi’s biggest trump card: the threat of using a nuclear weapon, or even just selling nuclear material or technology, if he believed it was the only way to save his 42-year rule. While Colonel Qaddafi retains a stockpile of mustard gas, it is not clear he has any effective way to deploy it.
“Imagine the possible nightmare if we had failed to remove the Libyan nuclear weapons program and their longer-range missile force,” said Robert Joseph, who played a central role in organizing the effort, in the months just after the invasion of Iraq.
“You can’t know for sure how far the Libyan program would have progressed in the last eight years,” said Mr. Joseph, who left the administration of President George W. Bush a few years after the Libya events, partly because he believed it had gone soft on nuclear rogue states. But given Colonel Qaddafi’s recent threats, he said on Monday, “there is no question he would have used whatever he felt necessary to stay in power.”
Whether he would have is, of course, unknowable.
But Colonel Qaddafi appeared to sense that loss of leverage over the last two years. The cables indicate a last-minute effort to hold on to the remnants of the program, less to assure his government’s survival than to have some bargaining chips to get the weapons and aid that Colonel Qaddafi and his son insisted they were promised.
The cache of nuclear technology that Libya turned over to the United States, Britain and international nuclear inspectors in early 2004 was large — far larger than American intelligence experts had expected. There were more than 4,000 centrifuges for producing enriched uranium. There were blueprints for how to build a nuclear bomb — missing some critical components but good enough to get the work started.
The whole package of goods came from a deal the Qaddafis struck with Abdul Qadeer Khan, one of the architects of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, who built the world’s largest black-market network in nuclear technology. The $100 million to $200 million that the Central Intelligence Agency later estimated that Libya spent on the nuclear project has never been recovered. For their part, the Libyans could never get the system working; many of the large centrifuges were still in their wooden packing crates when they were turned over.
The haul was so large that President Bush, with photographers in tow, flew to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to celebrate a rare victory against nuclear proliferation. He briefly noted the success in his recent memoir, “Decision Points,” saying that with the surrender of the weapons Libya “resumed normal relations with the world.” Mr. Bush lifted restrictions on doing business with Libya and praised Colonel Qaddafi, saying his actions had “made our country and our world safer.”
In Libya, the story was told differently. In an interview with The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a documentary, “Nuclear Jihad,” Seif Qaddafi complained that the West never followed through on many of its promises.
By 2009, when the Qaddafis were refusing to turn over the remaining highly enriched uranium, he said the decision to give up the weapons had been “contingent on ‘compensation’ from the U.S. including the purchase of conventional weapons and nonconventional military equipment,” a cable in late 2009 reported to the Obama administration.
Colonel Qaddafi, his son said, was unhappy that the centrifuges ended up in the United States, which he called a “big insult to the Leader,” and that little compensation followed.
Today, Obama administration officials say that whether or not the Bush administration carried through on its promises, the deal has deprived Colonel Qaddafi of far more fearsome weapons that he might have reached for as he tries to stay in office.
While it is unclear whether he might have ultimately succeeded in building nuclear weapons, Colonel Qaddafi gave up thousands of shells filled with chemical weapons as part of the deal.
“They were bulldozed,” William Tobey, a former senior official in the Energy Department under Mr. Bush recalled on Monday. While Colonel Qaddafi has many tons of mustard gas left, Mr. Tobey said, “it’s very difficult to handle and I’m not sure it’s useful” to the Libyan leader.
But the message of the Libyan experience to other countries under pressure to give up their arsenals may not be the one Washington intends.
Iran and North Korea, who have often been urged by the West to follow Libya’s example, may conclude that Colonel Qaddafi made a fatal error.
While South Korea is dropping leaflets in North Korea alerting its population to the uprisings in the Middle East, senior South Korean officials acknowledged in interviews last week that should North Korea face a similar uprising, it could use the threat to unleash its arsenal — which includes six to a dozen nuclear weapons by most estimates — in an effort to keep neighboring countries from encouraging the government’s ouster.
“When the North collapses — and one day it will, of course — we’re going to face a problem that we’ve been spared in Libya,” one senior South Korean official said on Friday in Seoul, declining to speak on the record about the most sensitive contingency planning involving South Korean and American officials. “You have to bet that the leadership is going to threaten to use its weapons to stay in power. Even if they are bluffing, it’s going to change the entire strategy.”
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