Your honor I would like to place into evidence an analysis by one Fred Kaplan about the Bush administration complete failure in the North Korea nuclear crisis that they have managed to stretch out for four years and make worse with every passing season.
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..the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.
Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally without a plan for the "post-war" era. But the Bush administration's inept diplomacy toward North Korea might well have graver consequences. President Bush made the case for war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons--which turned out not to be true. Kim Jong-il may have nuclear weapons now; he certainly has enough plutonium to build some, and the reactors to breed more.
Yet Bush has neither threatened war nor pursued diplomacy...
Read rest at source (Link above).
A Washington Post article says:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday if North Korea successfully tests a nuclear weapon, it will show weakness on the part of the international community.
"And that failure ... is something that the international community would have to register and ask itself how comfortable are we being that ineffective in this situation," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon during a visit by Croatian Defense Minister Berislav Roncevic.
His comments came as U.S. officials warned North Korea anew not to test a nuclear weapon.
"It isn't in their interest and it isn't in anyone's interest," Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator on the communist country's nuclear program, told AP Television. "We will not accept a nuclear state."
But they don't say what they will do about an actual test.
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