- In his famous "axis of evil" speech, President
George W. Bush said "North Korea is a regime arming with missiles
and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens."
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- Fair enough.
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- So why is the United States hand-delivering to Great
Leader Kim Jong Il a pair of nuclear power reactors capable of producing
enough weapons-grade plutonium each year to make dozens of nuclear bombs?
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- In the early 1990s, North Korea was running domestically
built reactors that were churning out bomb-grade plutonium. It was the
heart of a covert weapons program that has, according to U.S. intelligence,
already yielded "one or two" nuclear bombs.
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- The Clinton administration convinced Pyongyang to shut
down those reactors and to allow in UN weapons inspectors. In return, North
Korea was to get two U.S.-designed light-water reactors, or LWRs, and free
heating oil each year until they were built. The Bush team has not blocked
the policy, and last month concrete was poured for the reactor foundations.
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- If North Korea needs energy to replace its homemade reactors,
why not build them coal- or gas-fired plants? These are far cheaper to
build and run than nuclear plants. And as an added bonus, coal plants can't
moonlight as factories for weapons of mass destruction.
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- Apparently the State Department has convinced itself
light-water reactors can't be used to make bombs. But they can -- something
the State Department does recognize when discussing Russia's plans to build
the same reactors in Iran.
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- "LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs'
worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran," write
Henry Sokolski, who runs a nuclear nonproliferation center (<http://www.npec-web.org>www.npec-web.org)
in Washington, and Victor Gilinsky, a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. "This is true of all LWRs -- a depressing fact
U.S. policymakers have managed to block out."
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- Even the State Department's uneasily evasive language
gives up the game: the LWRs in North Korea (apparently unlike Russia's
in Iran) are "proliferation-resistant." As opposed, one assumes,
to "proliferation-proof."
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- The old Korean-designed reactors had to be refueled frequently,
and it was easy for Pyongyang to quietly pull out the bombs-grade gunk
inside. Light-water reactors, by contrast, have to be shut down for an
extended period to extract such material. This is what qualifies them as
"proliferation-resistant" -- because it's hard to do this secretly.
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- Sokolski and Gilinsky, writing in The Washington Post,
cited a study by the Lawrence Livermore weapons laboratory, which says
upon the first scheduled refueling -- about 15 months after the reactors
go into operation -- an LWR will contain about 300 kilograms of near-weapons
grade material. Assume North Korea diverts that material to bomb-making,
and it could have "a couple of dozen bombs in a couple of months."
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- Yet the program's backers argue, straight-faced, that
because North Korea knows it will eventually be caught, it will be afraid
to do this. Never mind that North Korea, like Iraq, is still keeping out
UN weapons inspectors. And never mind that since Sept. 11 last year, Washington
has denied Americans much the same knowledge of reactor safety and operations
it now intends to share with a regime listed as a state sponsor of terrorism.
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- The whole arrangement is so ludicrous that it's surprising
more of America's enterprising politicians aren't piling on to complain
about it. We are using the holiest of holies -- the American taxpayer's
dollar -- to build a nuclear program for a reclusive North Korean dictator.
Duh!
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- Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, is
a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].
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- http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2002/09/16/007.html
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