The Hindu : Bush wary of N. Korean claims

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 17, 2003

International

International

Bush wary of N. Korean claims

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON JULY 16. The Bush administration has now a new and different foreign policy challenge on its hands, not sure if North Korea is speaking the truth or bluffing when it says that it has produced enough plutonium for about half a dozen nuclear bombs. "I'm not in a position to characterise the intelligence assessment of what the North Koreans are telling us, but certainly what they have told us in the past has been worth paying attention to," said Lawrence Di Rita, a top aide to the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

The North Korean declaration on the completion of plutonium extraction was made in New York at a meeting last week between a State Department official dealing with North Korean issues and Pyongyang diplomats based out of the United Nations.

The Pentagon said that it was unlikely that North Korea had finished processing fuel rods at its Yongbyon complex. But officials here and in South Korea believe that the process may have begun.

The administration here is terrified at the prospect of North Korea sitting on a cache of nuclear weapons; and the bottomline fear is that Pyongyang might end up selling weapons or technologies to interested countries or even to terrorist outfits. "It's a country that has sent ballistic missile technology to a lot of bad places. It's a country that, if it felt were in its interest, it would sell nuclear technology," Mr. Di Rita has said. The problem to the administration is that the claims of North Korea cannot be brushed aside too quickly or easily.

The President, George W. Bush, has said in the past that a nuclear armed North Korea is unacceptable to the U.S. But officials have been persistent with the theme that the U.S. is looking for a diplomatic way out of the problem. The refrain here is that the situation is serious but has not risen to the crisis levels.

At the White House, the new spokesman, Scott McClellan, stressed that Washington was not about to cave in to the demands of Pyongyang "We will not submit to blackmail or grant inducements to the North to live up to its expectations," the spokesman said. At the same time, when asked if the President might resort to the use of military force against North, Mr. McClellan remarked, "The President never takes options off the table, but it's something that we want to address in a multilateral way."

Meanwhile, the Director of the Central Intelligence Committee, George Tenet, is appearing in a closed-door session with the Senate Intelligence Committee later today where this issue could be raised. The meeting is expected to be heavily focussed on Iraq and in the kind of intelligence assessments particularly in the context of Iraq's uranium purchase efforts from Africa. But many Senators in the past have been quite ciritical of the CIA as it related to intelligence gathering on North Korea as well.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

International