The Bush administration claimed since 2002 that North Korea had a nuclear weapons program—a proposition that was summarily mocked by opponents who pretended that Bill Clinton’s ridiculous 1994 deal with the North Koreans was as good as gold.
Now North Korea admits for the first time, officially, that is has nuclear weapons, despite saying over and over that they didn’t. They had been saying instead that their nuclear program was all for power generation purposes. (Sound familiar?)
SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea announced for the first time Thursday it has nuclear weapons, and it rejected moves to restart disarmament talks anytime soon, saying the bombs are protection against an increasingly hostile United States.
The communist state’s statement dramatically raised the stakes in the 2-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea’s nuclear program through six-nation talks.
“We … have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration’s evermore undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North),” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency. The news agency used the colloquial term “nukes” in its English-language account.
It said Washington’s alleged attempt to topple the North’s regime “compels us to take a measure to bolster its nuclear weapons arsenal in order to protect the ideology, system, freedom and democracy chosen by its people.”
Notice how the news story as written by Sang-Hun Choe, Associated Press Writer, then concludes by INFORMING us that, despite the story he just wrote, the Bush administration, after long suspecting North Korea of having a secret nuclear weapons program, was wrong. The reporter says North Korea was now “restarting its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program, which had been frozen under the 1994 agreement.”
The nuclear crisis began in 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of running a secret uranium-enrichment program in violation of international treaties. Washington and its allies cut off free fuel oil shipments delivered to the impoverished country under a 1994 deal with the United States.
North Korea retaliated by quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in early 2003 and restarting its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program, which had been frozen under the 1994 agreement.
The whole point is that it wasn’t in fact “frozen” at all. A team of third world scientists can’t restart a nuclear weapons program and in one year produce nuclear weapons. Ask Iran. And Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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