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(回答先: NYT “アメリカ, 今すぐは金正日の執権を望んでいない”【DailyNY】 投稿者 tk 日時 2008 年 9 月 16 日 13:05:09)
http://ameblo.jp/warm-heart/entry-10140044797.html から部分転載。
The New York Times の英文記事、「キム・ジョン・イルがいないと困るかもしれない（ムシャラフの時みたいに）」はこちら ⇒
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/weekinreview/14sanger.html?scp=4&sq=Kim&st=cse
The World
We May Miss Kim Jong-il (and Maybe Musharraf)
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: September 13, 2008
WASHINGTON — Last week, when the news filtered out of the black hole of North Korea that Kim Jong-il likely suffered a stroke in August, no one in the Bush administration rushed out to buy a get-well-soon card. This is, after all, a man President Bush has described as a “tyrant,” a dictator who starves his own people, and, according to some Senators, a “pygmy” — the biggest insult for a guy who keeps a lot of elevator shoes in the presidential closet in Pyongyang.
But whatever names he is called, there was a surprising ambivalence in official Washington about the news — more than a whiff of reluctance, in fact, to lose Mr. Kim at the helm just now.
This was true especially among intelligence officials, who wake up every day worried about what happens when states implode, and whether there will be a free-for-all for their weapons.
Such shudders have not been limited to the Hermit Kingdom this summer. They were also felt about Pakistan even before its president, Pervez Musharraf, resigned in mid-August rather than face impeachment. Knowing Mr. Musharraf was on thin ice, the United States government had already run “tabletop exercises” in which a Pakistani descent into chaos would leave everyone wondering who was in control of that country’s nuclear arsenal. Would it be the new elected prime minister, whom the military deeply distrusts? The army? The small clique of trusted Musharraf aides who built the country’s nuclear security system, but no longer have a patron?
In fact, the worries about these two unsteady nuclear powers have begun to change thinking among officials in Washington who used to focus principally on the awful scenario that a nuclear weapon might pass straight from a government to a terrorist group. Now, seven years after the post-9/11 panic, when a C.I.A. agent known as Dragonfire erroneously reported that Al Qaeda had hidden a nuclear weapon in New York, the worry is being broadened — to a new focus on whose hands control the nukes within a government, especially at a time of great confusion.
It is not that anyone is more sanguine about the possibility of a terror group acquiring enough nuclear material to set off an atomic bomb in an American city. That is still the No. 1 worry. But the way the problem is analyzed is beginning to shift.
“You know,” one senior intelligence official who would not speak on the record because he monitors the Pakistani arsenal said, “we used to have this great distinction between ‘states with nukes’ that we could deter the old-fashioned way, and ‘groups with nukes’ that we couldn’t deter.” But today, he said, “our biggest problem may be groups within states” that could take advantage of political chaos to seize what they need, either to sell it or to win a struggle for leadership of the country.
Oh, for the simple days of President Bush’s formulation of “with us or against us.” Before he came up with alternative rationales for the Iraq war, President Bush often said that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had changed his view of tolerable risk, and he insisted that the possibility, no matter how slim, that Saddam Hussein would obtain or sell a weapon was unacceptable. Yet to experts in his own administration, what’s happening today in countries like North Korea and Pakistan poses a far higher statistical risk of letting loose nukes out the door than Iraq ever did. (For one thing, there is no question that they have the nuclear material.)
The president himself has been silent about this problem, but his spokesmen and the Pentagon’s have a stock answer to questions about it. It boils down to this: There is little reason to worry as long as the military remains in charge. Their reason: While North Korea and Pakistan have little else in common, they both have strong militaries with a well-honed sensibility about survival.
“It is very difficult for me to imagine someone arriving at a North Korean facility with guns blazing and emerging with a nuclear weapon,” said Matthew Bunn, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is the author of an annual survey titled “Securing the Bomb.” “And the military understands that there is a big chance of retaliation if they ever sold anything to a terrorist — retaliation that would remove them and everyone they ever met from power.”
That is why the American bomb-watching community has a grudging fondness for Mr. Kim, the “pygmy dictator.” The Americans’ biggest fear about North Korea is a collapse of the state, in which a starving, broke nation simply implodes. That could send everyone on a mad scramble for the country’s arsenal — the Chinese, the South Koreans, the Russians, the Americans. “The bad news about North Korea,” said Jonathan Pollack, a North Korea expert at the Naval War College, “is that we don’t know much about their nuclear control system. Or even if they have much of one.”
The good news is that the arsenal is small. In recent negotiations with the United States, before Mr. Kim fell ill, the country said it possessed about 82 pounds of bomb-grade plutonium. If they are not lying (a significant “if’”) that’s about enough to make six weapons. Some in the C.I.A. think the North Koreans could have 12 or more weapons. It’s nothing to sneeze at, but compared to Pakistan’s arsenal, it’s a manageable number.
Pakistan has a sophisticated Nuclear Command Authority, with layers upon layers of protections, some of them installed with the help of a covert American program that has already spent more than $100 million. Its leaders are acolytes of Mr. Musharraf, but they are thought to be military professionals first, and therefore responsible.
But unified leadership at the top still counts. The problem is that Pakistan has a great deal of nuclear material, and is making more at a quick pace. Its facilities are spread out, so that India could not easily attack them all. The intelligence service, the I.S.I., has deeply divided sympathies, with many supporting the Taliban and extremist causes. And the bulk of the military isn’t much better.
“So when a Pakistani facility gets attacked,” asks Mr. Bunn, “what do the guards do? Do they fight? Do they help? Do they run away?”
Recent history is not especially reassuring about either Pakistan or North Korea, considering how much technology has already leaked from them to other states. Pakistan’s laboratories were where Abdul Qadeer Khan started his nuclear proliferation ring and flourished during political upheaval in the 1990s. Dr. Khan has been under house arrest, but in recent months he has been allowed to move around much more freely.
And when the Israelis bombed a nuclear reactor in Syria a year ago, it soon came out that they had a lot of design and building help — from the North Koreans. That was when Mr. Kim had his full faculties. The nightmare is how much worse the leakage could get if it is unclear who is in charge.
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