What is shocking in this assertion is the lack of physical evidence available for independent inspection, and the apparent complete failure of U.S. authorities to seek international inspection via the IAEA before the Israelis bombed the site in question, despite the fact that the U.S. was apparently aware of Israeli intentions well ahead of time. Syria has been a ratified signatory of the NPT since 1969, making it obligated to accept inspections. If, as the CIA asserts, the Syrian facility has been under construction since 2001, there was more than ample time to inform the IAEA of a signatory's possible failure to abide by the treaty. Repeated unannounced overflights of Syrian territory by Israeli jets in recent years indicates long-term planning of this mission.

Possibilities? The Bush administration might prefer to use this event to imply nuclear weapons production on Iran's part, because it is an ally of Syria, or the claims of North Korean assistance might provide cover for eventually abandoning the six-nation talks involving North Korea and provoking them in some way. Suggestions that the Israelis wanted to use the bombing raid to penetrate and compromise Syria's Russian-built air defenses preparatory to a future attack on Iran are not wholly out of the realm of possibility.

It's possible that the Syrians were building a bomb-fuel reactor with North Korean assistance, and imagined, wrongly, that they could escape detection. Certainly, North Korea's economy is so awful that they would be desperate for revenues. But, there's no physical evidence of such activity which has been independently verified, and the Bush administration's record on this sort of thing is, well, dubious, at best. Nor can one discount Syria's previous cooperation with the IAEA, and the necessary evidence would have come from an IAEA inspection. It's also possible that the Syrians were building something military in nature that they wanted kept secret, and which had nothing to do with a nuclear program, but which alarmed the Israelis, anyway, such as an early warning facility, ground-based laser, something along those lines.

The CIA video depends heavily upon computer models, and those models add substantial pieces of equipment not shown in the photos of the "nearly completed" facility. Remember that Colin Powell depended upon artists' renderings of "mobile bioweapons labs" instead of physical evidence, and that Rumsfeld used cartoonish illustrations to show lavish al-Qaeda complexes, replete with living quarters, office space, truck parking and ventilating systems, like the Islamist equivalent of Cheyenne Mountain, buried inside Tora Bora. Those, too, were never found.

One more final consideration: the Yongbyon reactor, from the descriptions by inspectors in 1994, is a real hunk of junk, by contemporary standards. The inspectors could tell from the condition of the spent fuel rods that there were many operating problems and shutdowns because of problems. Nuclear safety at the site was marginal to non-existent. The bomb test using plutonium from it was very likely a fizzle yield. If the Syrians got a duplicate copy of the Yongbyon reactor, as the CIA claims, they were very likely wasting their money.