Is Myanmar Trying to Build a Nuclear Bomb?

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Theunis Bates
Contributor
(June 4) -- It's easy to draw parallels between Myanmar (formerly Burma) and North Korea. Both Asian states are international pariahs, governed by brutal regimes that live in outrageous opulence while their subjects languish in extreme poverty.

And now, according to a high-level defector from Myanmar's armed forces, the rogue nations have something even more worrying in common -- a nuclear weapons program.

Former Myanmar army major Sai Thein Win says the ruling junta is attempting to develop a nuclear bomb with the help of North Korea. Sai says he was trained in missile technology in Russia and worked at two military factories in the heart of the country.

His claims also are backed by photos of bunkers and equipment and top secret documents, which are detailed in a new report by the Democratic Voice of Burma, a news agency run by Myanmar expatriates.

"They really want to build a bomb," Sai, who is now in exile, told the DVB. "That is their main objective."

The Myanmar generals' atomic quest appears to have been inspired by ally North Korea, which can now attack its southern neighbor and flout international law, as its nuclear deterrent keeps it safe from retaliation.

Critics might dismiss Sai as a disgruntled former soldier out to settle old scores. However, independent nuclear experts have backed his assertions.

Robert Kelley, a former director at global nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency, studied the evidence and helped draw up the 30-page report. "It appears that it's a nuclear weapons program," Kelley told the DVB. "There's no conceivable use for this [equipment] for nuclear power."

The revelations clearly have the U.S. government worried. Sen Jim Webb had been scheduled to fly to Myanmar on Thursday night for talks with the government and jailed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. However, the Virginia Democrat canceled that trip, saying in a statement it would be "unwise and potentially counterproductive for me to visit Burma" until he had "clarification" on the claims of nuclear cooperation between Myanmar and North Korea.

Included in the DVB report are photographs and floor plans of two factories where Sai used European machining tools to make prototypes for nuclear missile facilities. The European kit was sold through two companies in Singapore to Myanmar's Department of Technical and Vocational Education, which the DVB says is a front for its nonconventional weapons program. Fortunately, the machines were shipped without all of the precision parts needed to build nuclear enrichment or missile technology.

The DVB document also boasts a copy of a secret document from the country's "nuclear battalion," which orders one of Sai's factories to construct a "bomb reactor ... for the use of special substance production."

However, a sketch of the "bomb reactor," the DVB explains, reveals that the device is not a nuclear bomb or a nuclear reactor but instead "a strong vessel that could contain a violent chemical reaction." (Such a reaction occurs when uranium and magnesium are mixed to create uranium metal, which through a highly complicated and costly process can be purified for use in nuclear warheads.)

Sai photographed the finished bomb reactors, one of which had seemingly been used to reduce metal. "A bomb reactor built by a special factory, subordinate to the Army Nuclear Battalion, is a very good indicator of a nuclear program in the context of many other things," the report said.

The international community has long suspected Myanmar of harboring nuclear ambitions. Over the past decade, the regime has signed several deals with Russia, which agreed to provide the country with a research reactor. (Work on this project hadn't started as of last summer, says Washington's Institute for Science and International Security, which monitors nuclear proliferation efforts.)

Myanmar's leaders have stated that this planned facility would create medical isotopes. But as few of the country's citizens have access to a doctor, let alone state-of-the-art radiological equipment, most experts have dismissed this argument as bogus.

There is also strong evidence that Myanmar has been covertly pursuing its nuclear aims. Last August, the The Sydney Morning Herald cited defector accounts that the regime was building two reactors with the assistance of North Korea and planned to construct other facilities to refine and enrich uranium. Unlike the DVB report, though, these accounts were not backed with hard photographic evidence.

And in April, a North Korean ship carrying a suspicious arms cargo was reported to have docked in Myanmar. That led the U.S. State Department to request that May's meeting of economic officials from Southeast Asia and America go ahead without Myanmar's representation. It's possible the ship was merely carrying conventional weapons, but such a strong reaction has caused some experts to wonder whether the vessel was in fact hauling nuclear contraband.

Although Myanmar clearly has the desire to build a nuclear bomb, its means don't yet match its will. Sai's photographs show many of the European machines rusting, surrounded by rat droppings and with frayed electrical cabling. And design sketches of a molecular laser isotope separation device -- used to divide enriched uranium, which could be used in a bomb, from depleted uranium -- lacked even basic engineering details, like material tolerances.

However, those flaws don't mean that the U.S. and other concerned nations can ignore Myanmar. Again, North Korea provides a lesson.

Intelligence failures previously allowed the Koreans to export a nuclear reactor to Syria. That could have radically altered the military balance in the Middle East if the project hadn't been terminated by an Israeli bombing raid in 2007.

If a similar atomic scheme went unnoticed in Myanmar, it could have drastic consequences for America's Southeast Asian allies, such as Thailand and the Philippines