Update: Via the Nomad, an interesting theory on Syria’s relatively mild protests to Israels attack:

Notice how far away Dayr az-Zawr is from Israel. An F15/16 attack there is not a tiptoe across the border, but a deep, deep penetration of Syrian airspace. And guess what happened with the Russian super-hyper-sophisticated cutting edge antiaircraft missile batteries when that penetration took place on September 6th.

Nothing.

El blanko. Silence. The systems didn’t even light up, gave no indication whatever of any detection of enemy aircraft invading Syrian airspace, zip, zero, nada. The Israelis (with a little techie assistance from us) blinded the Russkie antiaircraft systems so completely the Syrians didn’t even know they were blinded.

Now you see why the Syrians have been scared speechless. They thought they were protected - at enormous expense - only to discover they are defenseless. As in naked.

Thus the Great Iranian Freak-Out - for this means Iran is just as nakedly defenseless as Syria. I can tell you that there are a lot of folks in the Kirya (IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv) and the Pentagon right now who are really enjoying the mullahs’ predicament. Let’s face it: scaring the terror masters in Tehran out of their wits is fun.

It’s so much fun, in fact, that an attack destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and the Revolutionary Guard command/control centers has been delayed, so that France (under new management) can get in on the fun too.

On Sunday (9/16), Sarkozy’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner announced that “France should prepare for the possibility of war over Iran’s nuclear program.”

Original post: Until more intelligence is made available on this situation, I remain highly skeptical of North Korean-Syrian nuclear cooperation, which would clearly cross lines that the Bush administration – which has let Pyongyang slide on recent deals – could not ignore. Or perhaps North Korea and Syria are relying on the tarnished reputation of U.S. intelligence and the always suspect information from Mossad and the Times article is correct:

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem. The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say. They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean.

[. . .]

Diplomats in North Korea and China believe a number of North Koreans were killed in the strike, based on reports reaching Asian governments about conversations between Chinese and North Korean officials.

I agree with ROK Drop that the target likely was not a weapons shipment bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that a mere missile shipment was an unlikely target (as North Korea and Syria have engaged in missile trade for years - though a highly advanced missile could get such a response), but that a more likely scenario might be North Korean assistance in weaponizing chemical or biological warheads for conventional missiles.

While noting that nuclear cooperation is possible, I just don’t find it very probable. ROK Drop also notes that Syria’s protest has not been very forceful, but I don’t necessarily think that nuclear material is the most likely reason; there just isn’t any (publicly available) evidence for that, yet. If North Korea (which has also denied nuclear cooperation) and Syria wanted to give the West a green light for bombing any and all facilities that could be related to such proliferation, nuclear collaboration between the two would be the thing to do. For this reason, I find biological cooperation more likely, though I don’t have any more evidence of that that the Times presents for the nuclear angle.

Arms control and WMD “experts” have come down on the left (the Times report is “nonsense,” said Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the liberal “think tank” Center for American Progress) to the more cautious Gary Samore:

In particular, I think the Israelis were worried that North Korea was sharing centrifuge systems with Syria, but I haven’t seen the evidence for that, so it’s hard for me to judge whether that’s a solid concern or not. In any event, it seems unlikely that the Syrian program would have been very advanced. Nonetheless, if Israel thought that there was a Detailed contingency planning for a possible attack on Iran has been carried out for more than two years by Centcom (US central command), according to defence sources.

[. . .]

Syria has always been an interesting case, because you would think a country in that position, faced with an enemy that has both conventional and nuclear superiority, would want to develop a nuclear option. That would make a lot of sense. But up to now the Syrians seem to have been content with a chemical and biological capability, which they would use as a deterrent against Israel. And it’s always been curious that the Syrians have never, as far as we know, developed a nuclear weapons program, unlike many other Arab countries: Egypt, Libya, and so forth.

The Times has a penchant for hyping some stories. For example, in today’s news much is made of U.S. contingency plans for attacking Iran - “Project Checkmate” - though there is nothing new or shocking about the DoD having such plans for known trouble spots, and some of the detail in the article can’t be proved in the public domain one way or the other.

Also see OFK, DPRK Forum, and Korean Unification Studies.