In a country with sketchy infrastructure and even sketchier channels of reliable information, speculation abounds about the existence of a nuclear reactor. There might have been more than one, but if so, no one said anything. Some said it lay deep among the malarial ruby mines of Mogok in the wild hinterlands about 200 km north of Mandalay. Others said it was hidden near a storied gorge an hour to the north of Pyin Oo Lwin, one hours drive from Mandalay in the softly breezy hills of Upper Burma. Others begged to differ. It lay south-southwest, security barriers and checkpoints radiating for miles. Or so they said.
But on the elusive nuclear question, I trusted a young Burmese army captain the most, for reasons that had everything to do with 1. his appurtenance to the dark side (ie. he was a fresh army engineer trained in the elite defense academies); 2. his recent two-year training trip to Moscow along with X other officers to hone his "skills in engineering," and 3. and most crucially, the fact that he smiled hard with that ubiquitous frozen smile that translates roughly as "I've been told to smile and say nothing if anyone asks" then giggled a bit then looked away for a split second. Every bit like that blushing, blanching lover in Racine's incest-ridden tragedy Phedre. But I swear this wasn't love. I'd simply asked him point blank if his time in Moscow wasn't in fact intended to develop the black art of nuclear engineering or, more to the point, could he point me in the direction of that pesky local nuclear reactor?
I had met him in Pyin Oo Lwin, a hilly outpost much favored by the British in colonial times for its soggy, European-style clime whose chiefest claim to proximity with Little-Surrey-On-The-Miln is strawberry cultivation. In the past couple of years, the town formerly known as Maymyo has become something of a satellite to the new capital, Naypyidaw, whose tiny population of generals' wives and ministers apparently far prefer said sogginess instead of that vacuum of dry heat with eight lane highways and scarcely a teashop in sight. Even if it does manage to ward off the urban riffraff of Mandalay and Rangoon (mainly by forbidding their passage except in coaches that zoom through in the dead of night), Naypyidaw has a coldly soulless quality that sends a modicum of chills up the spine. Three sets of street lights in the style of American McMansionmania? Who on earth is arch Senior Gen. Than Shwe kidding? L'Etat c'est moi, maybe, but the taste of the court of Louis XIV, his is not, despite a royal complex well known to all. Naypyidaw, which in Burmese means "Abode of the Kings," is by all accounts his none too subtle attempt to revive the era of the Bagan kings of the 13 th c. As it turns out, he's also breathed new life into George Orwell. "Animal Farm" plays out to perfection in Pyin Oo Lwin, a town crawling with soldiers who come there to train in one of four elite defense academies.
"We're surrounded," seethed a town restauranteur.
Rather like the pigs who kick out Farmer Jones et al before moving into the farmhouse, Burmese generals now inhabit the vast red-brick Tudor manors left in Pyin Oo Lwin by the British. As for the plebians, sorry civilians, they squat in the usual tumbledown shacks, stacked atop one another in the town center, which is otherwise a pretty touristic draw with painted pony carriages. In the Lonely Planet guide to Burma, Pyin Oo Lwin amounts to something of homesick reststop before heading back into the thick of jasmine-and-sticky-rice-infused exoticism.
But it's also rife reporting ground for uncovering secrets. Several people there let slip that anywhere from 200 to 300 Russian instructors converge on the town every autumn. The point was confirmed by my captain, an alumnus of the Russian exchange program.I'd been caught by a sudden downpour as I cycled miserably through the backstreets, ever more soaked and cursing my luck, when a car passed, slowed down, and a young man in a starched deep green uniform leaned out the window, grinned lasciviously and asked if I was lost. No, actually. But I said yes. I thought, hell, why not, I might actually get a conversation with a member of the miltary. He led me back to my hotel then plopped down on the front porch as if he owned the place and demanded a coffee, either blissfully unaware or similarly disinterested by the sudden unease of the hotel staff. Turns out, he said, he wanted to practice his English on me. And, he said bashfully, he'd mistaken me for a Russian instructor. (Hmm. Wish I could say it was my cheekbones..)
It was a nice piece of luck. I'd deliberately headed for Pyin Oo Lwin to witness up close the parallel lives of the military. It was after all small secret that Burma had in the past 50 years become two countries -- one military, the other, everything else. But trying to pry beyond the state of indoctrination far behind the mask of smiles and giggles to the place where the secrets were locked in his mind was a bit like trying to pick apart a Swiss bank account with a needle.
In retrospect, a far better strategy would've turned on asking whether he thought Eugene Onegin was in fact a little harsh with Tanya. And either the captain would've on the spot replied with a brilliant lie suggesting he knew something, anything, about Russian literature or he'd have been so discombobulated and irked at my insolence that he'd have sworn aloud then stated frankly that Pushkin paled in comparison to Nabokov and, while endearing, wasn't actually the central subject of discussion in the Russian-Burmese annual exchange of high level genuis military engineers all of whom deserved to be part of a top secret program that promised to make Burma rule the world. Oops. Didn't mean to say that.
Ha! Caught red-handed.
But a journalist can always dream. And what of any talk of North Korea? 'Fact, he might've been the clever one, drowning out any such thoughts by deflecting to an old stalwart whose menace diminished some time around 1989.
As it turns out, the North Korean-cum-nuclear question is the most explosive development yet in an increasingly disturbing tale that began with Bertil Lintner's revelation that Pyongyang might have traded tunnel engineering for Burmese basics (ie food), escalated with a US Navy destroyer shadowing the N. Korean Kang Nam 1 as it headed for Burma bound with a suspected cargo of missile equipment and turned truly frightening with statements by US Secretary Hilary Clinton suggesting that the world had actually read the news clips and/or that kooky astrologically insignificant but brutal regime was in fact less a pariah than a dangerous potential rogue state with ambitions that would outdo even the most megalomaniac of Bond villains.
To return to that first link outa here, the revelations by Prof. Desmond Bell, an Australian specialist in strategic defense, and Phil Thornton, journalist, were based on the converging reports of two defectors whom they interviewed in painstaking detail over two years near the Thai-Burma border. Forgive the long quote (from their article first reported in the Sydney Morning Herald and replicated first person in the Bangkok Post), but this is fascinating stuff:
"What the defectors told us, and access to transcripts of Burmese Army communications, helped us straighten out much of the confusion and speculation on the public record. It has been widely reported that a nuclear reactor has been built at eight or nine different sites in Burma.
"The defectors' detailed and adamant testimonies, coupled with the radio transcripts, contradict this - they say Burma has no more than two reactors, one located at Myaing and the other at Naung Laing.
"But not everyone in the region agrees about the extent or the purpose of the Naung Laing operation. A senior regional security officer with extensive up-to-date inside information about the area disagrees.
"Before it was a heavily guarded 'no-go zone'. Now you can drive right up to the buildings. Villagers are allowed to grow crops again. Even though the signs say; 'Military Science and Technology Ministry' and there are soldiers, the level of security has been drastically reduced. I think it's now a decoy site, to distract people away from the Myaing area."
"The Myaing reactor is located in Magwe division and is known as the "Nyaungone Project". It is part of the MOU signed with Russia's atomic energy agency Rosatom (the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency) in May 2007 to build a 10-megawatt light-water reactor using 20 % enriched Uranium-235, nuclear waste treatment and burial facilities, an activation analysis laboratory, medical isotope production laboratory and to train 300 specialists for the nuclear centre.
"At the time, a US State Department deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, was reported as saying that the US 'wouldn't like to see a project like this move forward' until Burma has an adequate nuclear regulatory and security infrastructure in place.
"The second 'secret' or military reactor site that the defectors provided a large amount of detailed information about is built inside the smallest of three mountains by North Koreans at Naung Laing. Both the defectors agreed the underground mountain facilities house another 10-megawatt light-water research reactor."
Stay tuned. More serious nuclear discussion to come...
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