U.S. Wants Myanmar Transparency After Nuclear Program Reports

Businessweek, July 22, 2010, 12:18 AM EDT

July 22 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. called on Myanmar to disclose its relationship with North Korea amid concerns Kim Jong Il’s regime is helping the military-run Southeast Asian nation pursue a nuclear weapons program.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will hold meetings in Hanoi today with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which includes Myanmar. Tomorrow, she will join North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun at Asia’s biggest security forum.

“We have told Burmese officials that they have international obligations we expect them to heed,” State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said yesterday in an e- mail, referring to Myanmar by its former name. “This requires greater transparency in their dealings with North Korea.”

Myanmar told its Asean counterparts at meetings this week that it’s not seeking nuclear weapons. Jane’s Intelligence Review released an article yesterday with newly available commercial satellite images that it says corroborate allegations by Myanmar defector Major Sai Thein Win that the government is pursuing an atomic bomb.

“Myanmar’s government, the foreign minister, has told us categorically that they don’t have a nuclear weapons program, and have no ambitions” to start one, Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo told reporters in Hanoi on July 20.

Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win hasn’t addressed reporters at the meeting. Last month, after Al Jazeera television reported the allegations, his government said they were “baseless accusations based solely on the fabrications of deserters, fugitives and exiles.”

North Korea Ties

Myanmar conducts relations with North Korea “in the same way as it has been trying to maintain friendly relations with every nation,” the Foreign Ministry said in a June 11 statement. The country upholds United Nations resolutions regarding North Korea and shipments between the nations involve “normal commercial activities,” it said.

Photos of buildings and security fences near the country’s capital, Naypyidaw, confirm reports by Sai Thein Win of machine tool factories and other plants alleged to be part of a nascent program to build nuclear weapons, Jane’s reported from London.

“They will not make a bomb with the technology they currently possess or the intellectual capability,” Jane’s analyst Allison Puccioni said in an interview. “The two factors do make it possible to have a route to one.”

Military Ties

Clinton expressed concern about reports that North Korea and Myanmar are expanding military ties and sharing nuclear technology at a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Thailand last year. The U.S.

will remain “vigilant” against any military cooperation between the two countries, she said.

Yesterday, Clinton announced further sanctions against North Korea in an effort to halt the country’s nuclear-weapons program.

Sai said he worked at two factories involved in the nuclear program. His report to a U.S.-funded Myanmar opposition news website, Democratic Voice of Burma, based in Norway, included documents and color photographs of the interior of the installations.

The satellite imagery reviewed by Jane’s showed only the exterior of the buildings, Puccioni said.

Myanmar’s nuclear program is “overly ambitious with limited expertise,” Jane’s said in a statement yesterday.

While Myanmar is a signatory to international agreements to control nuclear weapons use, it hasn’t agreed to more recent changes in the treaties and therefore isn’t subject to international inspections, the magazine said.

Nuclear Free

The reports about Myanmar’s nuclear weapons program “perplexed” Asean member states, Indonesia Foreign Marty Natalegawa said in a July 20 interview. Asean ministers, including Myanmar, reiterated intentions to keep Southeast Asia free of nuclear weapons at the meetings this week.

The allegations directed at Myanmar are a “manifestation of the lack of information about what’s happening in the country,” Natalegawa said. “That’s why we think the best approach would be to ensure greater transparency so we have greater confidence about what’s going on.”

Asean works closely with the International Atomic Energy Agency and can send inspectors to Myanmar under the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone treaty, he said.

During President George W. Bush’s administration, North Korea discussed delivering short-range missiles and nuclear capability to Myanmar, according to Michael J. Green, an adviser at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and former senior director for Asia on the National Security Council under Bush.

The evidence points to a method of uranium enrichment, laser enrichment, that the North Koreans have never used, David Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector and now a fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Virginia, said in an interview.

“If it is laser enrichment the finger points more toward Chinese assistance or some place in the former Soviet Union,” he said.

--With assistance from Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Viola Gienger. Editors: Paul Tighe, Ben Richardson.

To contact the reporters on this story: Peter S. Green in New York at psgreen@bloomberg.net; Daniel Ten Kate in Hanoi at dtenkate@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net; Bill Austin at billaustin@bloomberg.net