NORTH KOREA CONDUCTS NUCLEAR TEST

U.S. Aid Helps N. Korea Build Nukes, Congress Told
By Lawrence Morahan
CNS Staff Writer
17 April, 2000

(CNSNews.com) - North Korea's nuclear production capacity will increase from a dozen nuclear bombs a year to 65 a year by 2010, thanks in large part to American taxpayer money, two renowned U.S. nuclear scientists told congressional leaders last week.

North Korea observers have long suspected the communist dictatorship is using Western humanitarian aid to starving North Koreans to feed Kim Jong Il's million-man army.

But an aid policy initiated by the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s to finance two light water nuclear reactors in North Korea puts the isolated communist country on the fast track in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, William R. Graham and Victor Gilinsky told members of the House Policy Committee.

North Korea's missile proliferation has accelerated dramatically since the Clinton-Gore administration began giving aid to the regime in 1994.

"There were no known No-dong missile sales abroad until after the United States signed the so-called Agreed Framework with North Korea," House Speaker Dennis Hastert's North Korea advisory group reported.

But since U.S. aid began, the communist state has sold crucial technology to Iran for the Shahab missile that now threatens U.S. forces and their allies in the Middle East, and for a Pakistani missile in 1998 that disrupted the fragile stability of South Asia.

In 1994 the Clinton administration signed an agreement with North Korea that was designed to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons development program. North Korea sought light water reactors to provide for their energy needs and the U.S. agreed to provide them in exchange for North Korea giving up its nuclear program.

Western aid also earned donor countries the right to inspect the North Korean nuclear facilities.

The U.S. believed the plutonium produced would have to be refined before it could be used for weapons grade plutonium, said Chuck Downs, a leading North Korea expert and author of "Over the Line: North Korea's Negotiating Strategy," in an interview with CNSNews.com. But even though the plutonium wasn't the same yield as that used by the U.S. and some NATO countries, it could still be used to make nuclear weapons, he said.

For the past six years the United States has been trying to put in place two 1,000-megawatt light water reactors in North Korea.

The Clinton administration gambled that construction would take so long that North Korea would collapse politically and economically before the reactors were put in place, Downs said.

"As things have turned out, North Korea has received $380 million in aid from various countries last year, $210 million of it from the U.S., and that is enough to satisfy the needs of their regime. So the regime is roaring drunk and not at all collapsing," Downs said.

When they are in place in 2010, the light water reactors will give the North Koreans 490 kilograms of plutonium every year, allowing them to build 60 to 100 nuclear weapons a year.

"The kinds of facilities that existed in 1994 could only have produced two bombs a year and the kind they conceived [before U.S. aid] a dozen a year," Downs said.

Nuclear critics say it is impossible to decouple the risks from the benefits of nuclear power, or the ability of countries that have nuclear power to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Ted Taylor, a nuclear scientist and critic of U.S. nuclear policy, told CNSNews.com that all of the world's 450-odd nuclear power plants automatically make plutonium as a side product. "So there's a huge amount of plutonium, which is the stuff from which nuclear weapons are made or can be made, spreading worldwide without adequate safeguards against criminals, terrorists, or governments that are disobeying rules."

Taylor, an architect for decades of the U.S. nuclear program, including the program at Los Alamos, was a member of a presidential commission to investigate the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. "Nuclear energy is a major activity for destructive forces," he said.

North Korea Seeks Relations with South Korea

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who has written extensively on North Korea, told CNSNews.com that North Korea seemed to be headed in a more moderate direction politically and has indicated this by agreeing to meet with South Korea for the first time in 50 years.

"I think everyone accepts the fact that the North Korean nuclear program is in deep freeze at the moment, but the question is if we didn't essentially buy them off, what would be the alternative," Bandow said. "They haven't offered any ... There's reason to be critical but if you're going to be critical you have to come up with an alternative and I haven't seen one yet."

But Downs insisted the U.S. should stand firm when dealing with North Korea, especially in view of its known policies of nuclear proliferation to the United States' enemies around the world.

"If you're in the mode of giving gifts, then you give them gifts that don't kill you. You don't hand children the gun. We could have gone in and said we'll give them $20 billion worth of hydroelectric dams and solar energy, wind power, whatever they wanted. We could have thrown in a $5 billion distribution system so that this energy could actually be used. Right now they have two light water reactors that will produce 490 kilograms of plutonium but no distribution system, and they have no idea how they're going to distribute that electricity - if indeed that was their intention at all."

Everybody Didn't Do It: Clinton Administration is in a Class by Itself on Damaging Security Practices

(Washington, D.C.): The Clinton Administration's damage-limitation strategy in response to revelations about its failure to safeguard U.S. nuclear secrets from Chinese espionage -- namely, that other presidencies have had such problems, too -- has begun to unravel as scrutiny of the relevant facts has intensified. In particular, a succession of former officials and independent analysts have now established that the current administration departed from past practice significantly, notably by turning a blind eye to Chinese efforts to penetrate the U.S. government and economy and by punishing government employees who have sought to protect American interests.1

The latter aspect was powerfully underscored in an op.ed. article which appeared in yesterday's edition of the Wall Street Journal (see the attached). It was authored by a former Reagan Administration official, Michael Ledeen, who is currently a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Ledeen describes how President Reagan's administration expected -- and elicited -- enormous help in preventing the flow of high-technology to Communist regimes "from professional civil servants, particularly in the military." He added that: "It would have been unthinkable for those experts to have been silenced or coerced into lying about matters that directly affected national security. Yet, this has happened repeatedly during the Clinton years, as some recently uncovered documents show." (Emphasis added.)

Enter Jonathan Fox

As Mr. Ledeen notes, a case in point is that of Jonathan Fox, an attorney specializing in arms control on the staff of what was, until recently, called the Defense Special Weapons Agency. 2 Mr. Fox ran afoul of the Clinton party line when he wrote a memorandum opposing the President's certification that China was no longer proliferating nuclear weapons technology. According to Mr. Ledeen, "Mr. Fox's memo argued against the agreement on these grounds:

"It 'presents real and substantial risk to the common defense and security of both the United States and allied countries.'


"It 'can result in a significant increase of the risk of nuclear weapons technology proliferation.'


"'The environment surrounding these exchange measures cannot guarantee timely warning of willful diversion of otherwise confidential information to non-nuclear states for nuclear weapons development.'


"There was no guarantee that the nuclear information would be limited to non-military applications in China itself."

Such a presidential certification that effectively found that none of these to be the case was required by law before the United States could embark upon commercial nuclear cooperation with the PRC. 3 Political appointees in Mr. Fox's chain of command gave him the option of changing his memo or losing his job. In the end, the memo was rewritten to suit the Administration's needs for an undeserved Pentagon seal-of-approval. It was not signed in that form by Jonathan Fox, however.

As Mr. Ledeen points out, this is not an isolated case:


"Mr. Fox is not the only weapons expert in the government to have been instructed to lie or remain silent about the true consequences of sending military technology to China. Notra Trulock and his colleagues were told by their superiors at the Department of Energy that they should stop annoying people with accounts of Chinese espionage at Los Alamos. Similarly, professionals in the Pentagon such as Michael Maloof and Peter Leitner 4 were told to keep quiet about the approval of high-tech licenses that would strengthen Chinese military power. Both of them spoke out; others remain silent.


"But even when the professionals stick by their principles, their superiors have chosen to substitute facts with politically expedient disinformation. On at least two occasions, military experts who argued against high-tech exports to China later discovered that their recommendations had been altered in the Pentagon's computerized data base."

The Actual Record
"Disinformation" also describes efforts by Clinton Administration officials -- notably, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson -- to suggest that the real problems with security took place on the watches of previous Presidents. In fact, as Investor's Business Daily reported on 9 June 1999:

"The declassified version of the House [Cox Committee] report identifies 11 cases of Chinese espionage since the late 1970s. Eight took place during President Clinton's years in office. Two of the three prior cases were first learned in 1995 and 1997. In other words, the vast majority of the leaks over the past 20 years have sprung on Clinton's watch and nearly all the old leaks have shown up then. That's not all.

"The House report doesn't disclose the full extent of Chinese espionage in the Clinton years. Citing 'national security' reasons, the White House censured nearly 375 pages, including several recent cases. At least 24 times, the declassified version of the report states: 'The Clinton administration has determined further information cannot be made public.' Left out are details about Chinese espionage that took place in the 'mid-1990s' or 'late 1990s.'

"'Some of the most significant thefts occurred in the last four years,'said Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., who headed the House panel."

The Bottom Line

Conscientious government officials like Messrs. Fox, Maloof and Leitner, who were properly lauded by Mr. Ledeen and others he did not mention by name (notably, Ed McCallum, a retired lieutenant colonel in Army special operations who, in his capacity as DOE's Director of Safeguards and Security, has been warning for years about the Clinton Administration's malign neglect of basic security procedures at the Department of Energy 5 ) have a critical role to play in a real, and urgently needed, national damage-limitation strategy. Congress must ensure that they are given political protection against further retribution by the Clinton Administration.

More important still, these patriots must be given a platform from which they can help to identify the full extent of the Clinton team's malfeasance with respect to physical, information and personnel security matters and to direct corrective actions. An ideal approach to providing such a vehicle would be the creation of a Select Committee of the Senate imbued with the same authority and access to information and resources as the counterpart Cox Committee had in the House to whose staff such individuals might be temporarily detailed. At a minimum, they should be given ample opportunities to testify before this or other relevant committees of the Congress.







1 See the Center's Decision Briefs entitled China's Nuclear Theft, Strategic Build-up Underscore Folly of Clinton Denuclearization, C.T.B. (No. 99-D 31, 8 March 1999) and Campaigns Clinton Legacy Watch # 41: Security Meltdown at D.O.E. ([url=No. 99-D 48]No. 99-D 48, 26 April 1999[/url]).

2 See Broadening the Lens: Peter Leitner's Revelations on '60 Minutes,' Capitol Hill Indict Clinton Technology Insecurity (No. 98-D 101, 6 June 1998).

3 See the Casey Institute Perspective entitled The Big Lie: Long-term U.S. Interests Will Not Be Served By Presidential Misrepresentation Of Chinese Proliferation Acts (No. 97-C 105, 16 October 1997).

4 See Profile In Courage: Peter Leitner Blows The Whistle On Clinton's Dangerous Export Decontrol Policies (No. 97-P 82, 19 June 1997), Profile in Courage: Mike Maloof Speaks Truth to Power about Clinton's Dangerous Tech Transfers to China (No. 98-D 192, 30 November 1998) and S.O.S. -- Save Our Submarines: Latest Revelation About Chinese Espionage Underscores Need to Retain Full Trident Force (No. 99-D 58, 13 May 1999).

5 See Saving Lieutenant Colonel McCallum (No. 99-D 64, 1 June 1999).

timberland, I've answered your question in my own way.

Until America changes direction no talks will be fruitful

We're the one with the big club. We need to put down that club and then we'll be in a better position to try the North Koreans.

As I've said Clinton's reunification program was far saner than Bushie's very insane policy of isolation and threats.

Since we're nobody to trust we're gonna be unable to trust anyone else. We the ones up to no good. Of course the world will build deterrents to America's threats and pre-emptive wars. The Bushie Doctrine encourages that. The world aint about to not take Bushie's threats seriously.

October 11, 2006
Parties Trade Blame in Wake of Korea Claim
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

But the idiocy of Krugman shines through in his focus on the actions of the Bush Administration as the impetus of North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Archives can be fun.

timberlandko wrote:

Archives can be fun.

They can, and your article in particular was interesting. I never said Clinton was blameless. You see, I'm not a partisan shill either -- just as Paul Krugman isn't.

I know you're not, Thomas - for an elitist eurolefty, anyhow ( :wink: ).

timberlandko wrote:

I know you're not, Thomas - for an elitist eurolefty, anyhow ( :wink: ).

He, he! Thomas certainly might be an elist - but never a lefty!

Ashermann, that's right Clinton had a good policy going with Koreans. If we survive the evil policies Bushie we may get back to sanity. But IF is a very big word while Bushie is so determined to start WW3.