Bush's (Not Clinton's) "Neglect Set Stage For Kim's Move NEWS ANALYSIS
Diverted Attention, Neglect Set the Stage for Kim's Move
Up until 2001, North Korea's nuclear program was largely under seal and monitored by the U.N. What went wrong?
By Barbara Demick, Times Staff Writer
October 10, 2006
Conservatives quickly point to Clinton's agreements with Kim Jong Il, saying Clinton was too nice, and allowed North Korea easy access to the material needed for making nuclear weapons. This statement is only partially true. Clinton did not successfully prevent North Korea from sustaining a uranium-based program, which, as the article notes, "is an alternative technology easier to keep hidden." But Clinton did make efforts to prevent North Korea from acquiring plutonium-based nuclear weapons (and I think he did a pretty bang-up job): Little more than four years ago, the North Korean nuclear weapons program was largely under lock and key, the threat seen as a fleeting crisis of a previous decade.
North Korea's main nuclear center at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, was monitored 24 hours a day by U.N. surveillance cameras. International inspectors lived near the site. Seals were in place over key nuclear installations and a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon was gathering dust.
The problem for Bush is that the bomb detonated on Sunday wasn't uranium-based; it was plutonium based. Understand this, and you realize that it wasn't until President Bush came into office and stopped dialogue with North Korea, that the excrement really hit the fan: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/10/10/18221/590
Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly was told by a North Korean official that the North was cheating on its nuclear freeze obligations by conducting secretive research into highly enriched uranium.
...The Bush administration moved hastily to punish North Korea by cutting off shipments of fuel oil that had been pledged under the Agreed Framework.
Within weeks, the North Koreans put tape over the surveillance cameras at Yongbyon and broke the seals on their nuclear installations. By New Year's Eve, the U.N. inspectors were escorted out of North Korea.
... the United States ended up in effect throwing away a deal that had kept the more immediately threatening plutonium production facility at Yongbyon in check.
... Once the U.N. inspectors were gone, North Korea wasted no time. By mid-2003, it had repaired its mothballed nuclear reactor and cranked up the reprocessing plant where weapons-grade plutonium was extracted from spent fuel rods.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-wrong10oct10,1,3585288.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true
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