Micah Morrison at Fox News, with the cooperation of Simon Henderson, has published the set of documents that AQ Khan provided to Henderson including (1) his so-called “confession” (which is hardly contrite and probably better described as a “statement“), (2) An ISI report, presumably for foreign governments in lieu of access to Khan himself, on Khan’s activities that is revealing in its many ommissions and elisions, (3) the oft-discussed letter to his wife, Hendrina.

Morrison also published a few photos, a response by Jehangir Karamat to Khan’s allegations that he accepted a bribe, as well as some correspondence with the Governments of China and Iran.

I am glad to finally see the documents in print.  (I missed the broadcast, but that is just because I don’t watch television.) The documents clear up at least one minor mystery and shed considerable light on Khan’s motives, which helps make the case for putting them into the public domain.

The documents may not be reliable, but boy are they interesting!

The minor mystery is, well, minor.

Simon Henderson and I disagreed on an issue related to the broader question of whether North Korean officials really showed AQ Khan three nuclear weapons.  I said North Korea didn’t have enough fissile material, while Henderson referred me to one of his articles stating that North Korea “is already sitting on a stockpile of highly enriched uranium courtesy of Stalin, the Soviet leader.”

I didn’t find that statement credible and asked about its provenance. “Is this yet another of Khan’s assertions in these documents?” I wrote. “If so, this further undermines his credibility and demonstrates the need to place these documents in the public record to allow others to examine their contents.”

So, now we have the actual sentence from Khan’s statement:  North Korea “had also manufactured a few weapons as, according to Gen. Kang’s boss, they had received Kg 200 plutonium and weapon designs from the Russians in the mid-fifties after the Korean War.”

So, this is interesting.  First, Khan is repeating a claim by a senior North Korean official, probably Jon Byong Ho. Second, the material in question turns out to be plutonium, not highly enriched uranium.  Third, the alleged transfer occurred after the Korean War, which would also mean after Stalin’s death. (Stalin’s death in March 1953 is usually cited as a significant factor leading to the July 1953 armistice that marks the “end” of the Korean War. In any event, Stalin died first.)

Henderson was simply mistaken about the type of the material and the date of the transfer.  (Or Khan told the story differently in some document we do not have.) Such mistakes are innocent enough.  Indeed, Henderson was instrumental in releasing the documents and there is no advantage to be gained from misidentifying the type of fissile material.

Yet, this detail — the fact that the alleged material was plutonium, not highly enriched uranium — is important. If one has qualms about the wisdom of releasing documents that may contain exaggerations or falsehoods, consider this a case study in how openness can help shed light on Khan’s motives.

Thanks to Anatoli Diakov’s excellent article, The History of Plutonium Production in Russia, we have reasonably accurate estimates of Soviet plutonium production during the 1950s.

Two-hundred kilograms of plutonium is a lot of plutonium — 25 significant quantities.  It was also a significant fraction of Russia’s annual plutonium production during the 1950s.  (In 1955, Russia produced 349 kilograms of plutonium. At the time, processing losses were about 13 percent, so 200 kilograms of separated plutonium would represent two-thirds of Russia’s plutonium production from that year.  Even as Russia brought additional reactors online through the 1950s, Russia produced only 1210 kilograms of plutonium in 1959. Again, with 13 percent process losses, turning over 200 kilograms of would have represented nearly 20 percent of Russia’s plutonium production that year.)

A 200 kilogram transfer of plutonium in the mid-1950s seems very unlikely.  (It is hard to cost the production of 200 kilograms of plutonium to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, but it would have been astronomical.) Moreover, scholarly accounts based on Soviet historical archives — such as Georgiy Kaurov, A Technical History of Soviet-North Korean Nuclear Relations and Balazs Szalontai and Sergey Radchenko, North Korea’s Efforts to Acquire Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Weapons: Evidence from Russian and Hungarian Archives — ought to at least contain a hint of such a transfer.  They do not.  On the contrary, the timeline of known technical cooperation and documentary evidence regarding motive are both wholly inconsistent with the idea of a significant transfer of plutonium in the mid-1950s.

It would seem that such a transfer is, on face, simply not credible. Overall, Khan’s repetition of the claim seems to support the hypothesis that Khan would say just about anything to evade responsibility for his nuclear commerce.  “I didn’t do it.  If I did, I only gave them junk.  It doesn’t matter, anyway, because they already had the bomb. Blame Khrushchev.”

Releasing the documents opens Khan’s various assertions, and differing versions of events, to this sort of scrutiny.  I am grateful that Henderson and Morrison have enriched our conversation by placing these documents in the public domain.