美国国家公共电台 NPR Open Scientific Collaboration May Be Helping North Korea Cheat Nuclear Sanctions

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North Korea is subject to some of the strictest sanctions on the planet. The Trump 1 administration is depending on that pressure to force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, but new research shows the North is getting around sanctions. Through science, North Korea could be getting knowledge that the U.S. doesn't want it to have. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel explains.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE 2: Kee Park is a neurosurgeon at Harvard Medical School, and he's one of the few Americans who's actually been to a scientific conference in North Korea.

KEE PARK: They have one every year in May. Medical doctors present their research.

BRUMFIEL: Park says North Korea's scientists are really clever, and their work helps the isolated 3 nation get things it can't get otherwise. They've developed their own ultrasound machines, built a medical CT scanner from scratch.

PARK: They are now manufacturing their own artificial knee implants 4, and they're implanting them on their own patients, which, to me, is remarkable 5.

BRUMFIEL: The conferences are held in a big building in Pyongyang the North constructed a few years ago. A tribute to the nation's scientists, it's shaped like a giant atom.

PARK: And in the middle of the entire atrium is a massive missile (laughter).

BRUMFIEL: Actually, it's a rocket, not a missile - a model of the vehicle North Korea used to launch its first satellite. But that's kind of the problem - a rocket looks like a missile. It has a lot of the same parts and does almost exactly the same thing. It's what sanctions experts call a dual-use technology. Now, new research shared exclusively with NPR suggests North Korean scientists have been working on a lot of dual-use technology, and they've been doing it with researchers from other countries.

Josh Pollack is with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and an author on this new research. It reviewed over 1,300 North Korean scientific papers and found a lot more than knee implants.

JOSH POLLACK: There are aspects of mathematical modeling that look particularly applicable to missiles and aircraft. There is engineering work that relates to cables that would be used in nuclear reactors 6. That's pretty clearly dual-use. And my personal favorite is automotive research.

BRUMFIEL: Pollack pulls up one of the papers, a collaboration 7 between a North Korean scientist and Chinese researchers. The title sounds fairly innocent.

POLLACK: "Active Steering 8 Control Strategy For Articulated Vehicles."

BRUMFIEL: As Pollack explains, this paper is basically describing a technology used in very heavy trucks, trucks that can go off-road, for logging operations, say, or for something else.

POLLACK: It's nice to have a truck that can carry large missiles and can go off-road and hide.

BRUMFIEL: In fact, Pollack has seen trucks with active steering control like what's in the paper.

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BRUMFIEL: In North Korean military parades, these 16-wheeled trucks are carrying huge intercontinental ballistic missiles, the very missiles the U.S. is insisting the North must give up. Now, these trucks were imported illegally before China caught and stopped shipments. This paper and several others like it indicate that if the North can't import the trucks themselves, then they will obtain the technology to build them.

POLLACK: This is, in part, how the North Koreans go about beating sanctions.

BRUMFIEL: Pollack and his colleagues say, of those 1,300 papers, most are collaborations with Chinese scientists. About half, they believe, could have dual-use applications, and 100 or so are, quote, "of concern," meaning they need a close look.

ELIZABETH ROSENBERG: It does certainly appear that, in fact, some of this joint 9 scholarly activity should not have been done.

BRUMFIEL: Elizabeth Rosenberg is with the Center for a New American Security and a former Treasury 10 official who helped oversee 11 North Korean sanctions under the Obama administration. She says that sanctions largely focus on money and materials, not knowledge. Does it matter now that the North has nuclear weapons?

ROSENBERG: It absolutely still matters.

BRUMFIEL: That's because maintaining and upgrading the missiles and nukes is done by people.

ROSENBERG: You need an array of different kind of engineers and scientists and materials experts.

BRUMFIEL: And they are the ones who these research collaborations are benefiting. Fixing the situation will not be simple. Kee Park, the neurosurgeon who's been to North Korea, warns there's a lot of scientific research going on there that's legit, and some of it looks like it could be dual-use. Say researchers want to study a disease, that disease could also be useful as a biological weapon. So...

PARK: Would you then say to North Koreans and the Chinese, you cannot do research on things that kill their people, you know, infections?

BRUMFIEL: Sanctions are designed to target technologies the international community doesn't want North Korea to have. The problem is that the knowledge going into those technologies is often a lot more fuzzy. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.

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