By Robert Parry
October 17, 2006
North Korea’s nuclear test has been linked to a plutonium process that was unfrozen after George W. Bush started talking tough about regime change in Pyongyang and reversed a Clinton administration policy against aiming nuclear weapons at non-nuclear states.
The New York Times reported that U.S. officials have identified the source of the North Korean nuclear blast as plutonium harvested from a small nuclear reactor whose nuclear fuel was put under seal in 1994 through a deal reached with the Clinton administration.
But in 2003, after two years of mounting threats from George W. Bush – including listing North Korea as part of the “axis of evil” – the government of Kim Jong Il threw out international inspectors, unsealed the plutonium and began processing it.
Since then, although Bush has denounced North Korea and pushed for more sanctions, he has avoided a direct threat of military action. In part, Bush’s critics say, that is because the United States is bogged down in a war in Iraq, which was justified by false claims that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction.
In early 2001, Bush began his tough talk toward North Korea because of indications that Pyongyang had started a second nuclear development program using technology obtained from Pakistan and relying on uranium. Republicans blamed President Bill Clinton’s softness for this alleged breach of the 1994 agreement.
But U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that North Korea’s Oct. 9, 2006, nuclear test did not use this uranium process; instead the explosion relied on reprocessed plutonium unsealed in 2003 or possibly produced since then, the New York Times reported. [NYT, Oct. 17, 2006]
In other words, the Oct. 9 detonation could not have occurred if the Clinton agreement had remained in place and the plutonium program was still frozen.
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