"Epitaph on the Bush administration's failed policy in North Korea," writes Jack Pritchard, who recently resigned in protest as US Special Envoy to North Korea, and who last week was part of a US delegation that visited that country's Yongbyon nuclear facility from which 8,000 spent fuel rods have been moved.

"Whether the [spent fuel rods] have been reprocessed for weapons-grade plutonium, as Pyongyang claims, is almost irrelevant," Pritchard writes. "American intelligence believed that most if not all the rods remained in storage, giving policymakers a false sense that time was on their side as they rebuffed North Korean requests for serious dialogue and worked laboriously to devise a multilateral approach to solving the rapidly escalating crisis.

"But events of the last several years show that this approach is not working. In December 2002 North Korea was suspected of having one or two nuclear weapons that it had acquired before agreeing in 1994 to freeze its known nuclear program and to allow it to be monitored.

"More than a year later, North Korea may have quadrupled its arsenal of nuclear weapons. During the intervening period, the Bush administration has relied on intelligence that dismissed North Korean claims that it restarted its nuclear program at Yongbyon with the express purpose of reprocessing previously sealed and monitored spent fuel to extract plutonium to make a 'nuclear deterrent.'

"Now there are about 8,000 spent fuel rods missing — evidence that work on such a deterrent may have begun. It is just the most recent failure in a string of serious North Korea-related intelligence failures."

--The take-away? Anyone who thinks the Bush administration is serious about preventing nuclear proliferation is dangerously deluded. Indeed, Pyongyang has seemingly quadrupled its nuclear weapons arsenal during the Bush II reign while Bush and Cheney looked the other way -- at a disarmed and already well contained Saddam. The Bush administration isn't serious -- they are bigger fools and windbags than one could have imagined.

Posted by Laura at January 21, 2004 10:03 PM