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His analysis has since come under attack from Olli Heinonen, a former colleague at the IAEA, as well as from Dr. David Albright, with whom he co-authored a report in January on alleged Burma-North Korea nuclear links. Kelley discussed these issues with The Irrawaddy, both before and after disclosures surfaced about a sophisticated uranium enrichment operation at Yongbyon in North Korea.

Question: Remind us of the documentation that you reviewed as part of the DVB exposé of the Burmese military junta’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Can you tell us the significance and implications of this material?

Answer: First, the jargon and terms that people were using were reminiscent of insider knowledge, not just general mentions of ‘a nuclear program in Burma.’ I got a chance to interview the defector source, Sai Win, when he came out, and the photos he brought out were of pieces of chemical processing equipment at the factories he worked in. I recognized one of those objects as a bomb reactor, which is a very strong steel vessel for producing metal and chloride compounds, usually uranium or plutonium. What I found was a set of photos showing uranium compounds for use in a nuclear program, either for fuel in a nuclear reactor or metal parts in a nuclear bomb. I didn’t see much other purpose for those things or for keeping it all secret, for doing it in military factories or for lying to the Germans inspecting those factories—unless it were for a nuclear weapons program.

Q: Have any significant updates or new information come to light since the DVB report came out in June?

A: Probably the most insight I’ve got is that I have tried to understand the organization that lies behind the program—who has the money, who calls the shots. I understand that a little better now. There is a confusing division between the army and the Ministry of Science and Technology. That has led to a slowdown in the program, I think; but in the long term, the winner of that power struggle could take control of the program and really drive it on.

Q: We are in Bangkok now. One of the ‘weapons’ in the non-proliferation ‘arsenal,’ for want of better words, is the Bangkok Treaty. How can that be used to prevent or preempt any nuclear weapons program? Or, what can or should the international community be doing in response to what might be taking place inside Burma?

A: There are three classes of organizations that could deal with this. Firstly, the IAEA has two obsolete agreements with Burma, which most countries that have nothing to hide have updated—the Small Quantities Protocol (SQP) and the Additional Protocol. The IAEA would have to benefit from heavyweight diplomatic support to get back into Burma, which is very hard to do. The SQP has been amended in many countries and updated, but Burma refuses to engage on this. Secondly, there are sovereign states which may want to jump in, but they have issues in Iraq and Afghanistan, and may not want to get involved. The third party that could address this is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). It is their neighborhood, their problem, their treaty that is being violated; so maybe with everyone else busy with other issues it should be down to Asean to address this.

Q: What does it mean for the international non-proliferation system if this is not addressed or dealt with?

A: Do we intend to enforce the non proliferation treaty—ever? Or do we just sit and say someone else has got the best of us, and maybe we will stop them next time? For me, the next time is this time. The IAEA has already been pushed out of the game for now, and therefore I think it is Asean’s problem. This is the time to show that you have the will to solve a problem that you have discovered, and nip it in the bud.

Q: Since the report came out, is anything actually happening to investigate whether Burma is undertaking a nuclear weapons program?

A: one of the problems here is that the organizations involved in this work do not typically say what they are doing. Burma has told the IAEA three times that there is nothing to investigate. To the best of my knowledge, there has not been a lot of follow-up—from the entities or agencies that one would expect to be involved—on the material or with the sources that exposed what may be going on in Burma with regard to a nuclear weapons program.

Q: What did you make of the revelations by Dr. Siegfried Heckler, the former Los Alamos scientist, who disclosed what seems to be an unheralded level of sophistication in North Korea’s nuclear program?

A: The Americans who saw the North Korean centrifuge plant were stunned by the sophistication they witnessed. It has a completely modern control room, nothing like what those Americans have seen in other DPRK [North Korean] facilities. The US underestimated the North Koreans.

Q: You have said that the Burma program, from what you can see, is limited and unsophisticated in terms of its technical scope. Does this mean that a more cautious approach is needed in addressing or assessing whether or not Burma really is building a nuclear bomb?

A: There is no threat tomorrow, unless the DPRK, which has been helping, decides to do more. Or Pakistan, which has been selling nuclear secrets to anyone who will buy, decides to help. There is the chance that there is more to this than meets the eye, as what I can analyze is based only on the information and documentation that I have seen. There may be other work taking place elsewhere in the country that we do not know about, and that the source Sai Win does not know about—other parts of the government structure.

What we have seen in Burma is intent to build a nuclear program. We have strong evidence of Burma-DPRK ballistic missile cooperation. (The little hearsay I have regarding Burma-DPRK nuclear cooperation is too weak to even cite.) Burma is investigating centrifuges according to only one source, Sai Win, but he even made me a crude sketch of what he thinks it looks like. So something is afoot. What I am thinking is that we should not underestimate Burma, especially if they get outside help.

Q: What did you make of the recent PBS report, featuring two former colleagues of yours who challenged your analysis of what may or may not be taking place in Burma, with regard to a nuclear weapons program?

A: Neither [Heinonen nor Albright] has valid technical concerns. They only seek to try to damage my conclusions. Neither has read the report, or at least carefully. Albright declined to even look at the information when I offered to share it with him when it was brand new and collaborate on a joint analysis. His blatant bias makes him unable to comment because he dismissed all the information without ever seeing it. So he actually has no idea of how much information we have in total or what it says.

Heinonen is another case. He keeps making up things that I did not say and then attacking them ineptly. I think the problem is he does not know the difference and then confusion shows in most of his irrelevant statements.

Of course, I have vetted my technical conclusions with lots of people who agree with my assessment of what the uranium chemistry items are. We clearly state that any one of the items might have a different purpose, but given the collection of items that will be used in a chemical engineering sequence and the context in which they were discovered they are almost certainly for processing uranium, and for purposes that would not support a civil program in Burma.