DPRK’s Burmese Lifeline

In addition to the weapons sales and tunnel expertise the DPRK is trading for Burmese raw goods, including food,  New Old FriendsYangon is helping to extend Iran’s strategic reach in Southeast Asia.

…the Burmese military regime has recently boosted ties with Iran, which according to the UN report is also allegedly receiving nuclear and missile technologies from North Korea.

In recent years, Burmese and Iranian officials visited their counterparts homeland for the purported purpose of improving economic ties. Observers, however, said Than Shwe has made a tactical decision to develop relationships with other “pariah states,” particularly enemies of the US, to relieve Western pressure on his regime.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Ali Fathollahi met Burmese Foreign Minister Nyan Win and Minister of Energy Lun Thi during his trip to Burma on June 15-17.

“The two sides reiterated their desire to further expand the ties of friendship and economic cooperation and to increase cooperation in the regional international forums such as [the] United Nations and Non-Aligned Movement,” The New Light of Myanmar reported on June 18.

Fathollahi’s visit came three months after Maung Myint’s visit to Iran on March 8-11, when he met Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki and Deputy Minister of Petroleum H. Noghrehkar Shirazi.

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via North Korea Leadership Watch

The Economist has greater depth on Yangon’s progress on nukes and missiles.

Rimours that Myanmar is the next recruit to a shady nuclear and missile network that seems to link North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Syria and possibly others swirl intermittently. The missile link is clearest: in all these cases, including Myanmar’s, North Korea has either sold missiles or helped them build their own. But aside from an agreement in principle in 2007 for Russia to build a small research reactor for Myanmar, there has been little hard evidence of its junta’s nuclear ambitions. The recent defection of a former major in the Burmese army, Sai Thein Win, however, and the documents and photographs he brought with him, appear to confirm Myanmar’s intent, if not yet capacity, to enrich uranium and eventually build a bomb.

Sai Thein Win handed over his evidence to the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an émigré-run broadcaster based in Norway. The material has been analysed by Robert Kelley, an experienced former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear guardian. His 27-page report has plenty of caveats: Sai Thein Win is a missile expert, not a nuclear boffin, and some of what he reports is hearsay; some drawings are crude at best; some equipment seen in pictures could at a pinch have civilian uses too. But experimental work on lasers that could eventually be used to enrich uranium and other equipment for making uranium metal, a necessary step in bomb-making, heighten suspicion. So do close links between supposedly civilian nuclear officials and the Burmese army’s “nuclear battalion”, officially the Number One Science and Technology Regiment.

All this and other evidence, Mr Kelley’s report concludes, lead to the inescapable conclusion that such work is “for nuclear weapons and not civilian use or nuclear power”. An earlier report, published in January by the Institute for Science and International Security, an independent Washington-based outfit, debunked some of the wilder rumours about Myanmar’s nuclear quest. But it also concluded that foreign companies should treat inquiries from Myanmar no differently from “those from Iran, Pakistan or Syria”. All are known purchasers of illicit nuclear equipment.

Myanmar has only a “Small Quantities Protocol” with the IAEA. This exempts it from regular inspections, on the government’s assurance that it has nothing to inspect. Sharper questions are now likely to be asked. The agency had already been trying to dissuade Myanmar and Russia from the research reactor. Sai Thein Win, who learned missile expertise in Russia, says that since about 2002 hundreds of Burmese scientists have trained in Russian nuclear institutes, including one formerly linked to the Soviet nuclear-weapons programme.

Sai Thein Win offers no new insight into the North Korean link. But Western intelligence agencies watch North Korea’s activities in Myanmar. There have been reports that a company associated with the construction of a secret nuclear reactor in Syria (until it was bombed by Israel in 2007 just before completion) has worked in Myanmar too.

Here is another reason the DPRK is not going away anytime soon.


Filed under: Business/Economy, Iran, Korea, Military, Southeast Asia, WMD, WP Reblogs Tagged: dprk, missiles, myanmar, north korea, nukes