by CKR
Proving a negative is hard, but it looks like North Korea is on the way to doing it.
In 2002, the hawks in the Bush administration had their way and accused North Korea of starting up a clandestine uranium enrichment program. That destroyed the 1994 Agreed Framework, which had stalled North Korea's progress toward a plutonium weapon. The fuel rods that could have provided the plutonium remained in a cooling pond, the plutonium unseparated, until that time. Even through irregular shipments of promised fuel oil by the United States and South Korea, the North Koreans had kept their weapons program in abeyance.
Now we are finding that another nuclear weapons program wasn't there. The Washington Post article dutifully blames faulty intelligence, but we have to ask if 2002 wasn't the year of rigged decisions on the basis of cherry-picking. At that time, Donald Rumsfeld was running his own intelligence shop because the CIA and State's intelligence weren't giving him the grounds for war.
It sounds like the North Koreans were, at the most, checking out possibilities, much as the Iranian experiments with polonium and metallic uranium were checking out possibilites. Although not reporting these experiments may have been a violation of NPT obligations, there are different degrees of violation. Running a stop sign is not the same as driving the wrong way on a freeway.
The arguments against working this out peacefully with North Korea are still very much alive. We can expect John Bolton to fulminate for regime change as soon as he finds his next pretext.
But it appears that North Korea, so far, is following the road that South Africa followed to give up its nuclear arsenal. The tactics of Bolton and his allies led to reprocessing of those fuel elements and last year's underground test by North Korea. Why is anyone listening to them?
