The government in the north explains that far from being part of a weapons development program, the plant is needed for power generation. In particular, the reactor could make up some of the electricity shortfall caused by the cutoff in fuel oil supplies from both the United States and its allies in Japan and south Korea.

Pentagon spokesmen said January 31 that the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific has asked for reinforcements. The forces could be backup, reported the New York Times, "in the event that President Bush ordered any kind of pre-emptive strike against the North’s nuclear complex at Yongbyon." The paper reported that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "appeared inclined to grant Adm. [Thomas] Fargo’s request to send the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson to the area."

"Pentagon officials say the North Korean program could be set back for years with a precision strike on the reprocessing plant," reported the Times the previous day. "But such a strike would be enormously risky," continued the article, citing the north’s capacity to defend itself militarily.

Spy satellite pictures of the movement of trucks around Yongbyon--not surprising given the plans to restart it--were given sensational treatment by administration officials. The pictures had prompted "fears within the Bush administration that North Korea is preparing to produce roughly a half dozen nuclear weapons," reported the Times. The report also noted that "the satellites could not see exactly what was being put into the trucks."

Amidst the dire speculation one official admitted that the north Koreans "made no real effort to hide this from us."

Another U.S. spying mission came to a sudden end on January 26 when a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft crashed 35 miles south of Seoul in south Korea--the third crash involving these high-altitude spy planes since 1984. Air force officials would not reveal the plane’s mission. The north has frequently protested U-2 spy flights over its territory.

Sin Yong Song, the vice-minister of Power and Coal Industries for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), explained the north Korean government’s decision to restart the reactor in an interview with People’s Korea published January 27.  
 
Recover loss of electricity
Sin said that the startup will take several weeks. "We are speeding up our preparations," he said, explaining that "we have to immediately recover the loss of electricity caused by the stop of the supply of heavy oil" from the United States. The cutoff resulted in an "annual shortage of electricity at hundreds of thousands of kilowatts," he said.

The claim that the facility is for nuclear weapons production is "nonsense," Sin said.

North Korean representatives have rejected Washington’s claims that their government admitted undertaking a uranium enrichment program as part of nuclear weapons development. State Department officials made the accusations last fall after a visit to the northern capital of Pyongyang.

Shortly after it leveled these charges, the Bush administration cut off heavy oil and food shipments guaranteed by the Clinton administration in 1994.

A U.S. official "arrogantly demanded we admit to a uranium enrichment program, without presenting any evidence at all," a January 28 DPRK Foreign Ministry statement said. "We had no reason to admit it as he demanded and saw no reason to refute his claim."

Editorials in the north Korean press have called on the U.S. to withdraw nuclear weapons stationed in the south of Korea. While Washington says that it withdrew its nuclear arms from the peninsula in the 1970s, it maintains its official "neither confirm nor deny" stance toward such demands.

U.S. Navy ships and submarines of the Seventh Fleet carry nuclear arms, however--part of a military presence that includes 37,000 troops in south Korea.

U.S. president George Bush set the tone for the step-up in threats toward the north in his January 28 State of the Union address. "On the Korean Peninsula, an oppressive regime rules a people living in fear and starvation," he said. The north Korean government "is using its nuclear program to incite fear and seek concessions. America and the world will not be blackmailed."  
 
Democrats back Bush
Democratic Party representatives backed Bush’s stand. In his official response Governor Gary Locke of Washington declared support for the president "in working with our allies and the United Nations to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and [north Korean president] Kim Jong Il."

One week earlier Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, a well-known Democratic Party liberal, told the National Press Club that the White House should slow down its drive to war on Iraq and allow more time for weapons inspections. "The threat from Iraq is not imminent," he said, "and it will distract American from the two more immediate threats to our security--the clear and present danger of terrorism and the crisis with North Korea."

The air attack now under open discussion picks up where the administration of President William Clinton left off in 1994. The BBC reported in December that Clinton told a business dinner in the Netherlands, "We actually drew up plans to attack north Korea and to destroy their reactors and we told them we would attack unless they ended their nuclear program."

The 1994 agreement followed shortly after the threats were issued. In it the north agreed to shut down the Yongbyon reactor and two others under construction. In return, Washington agreed to lead a consortium of countries and companies to build two light-water reactors for electrical power, with a completion date of this year. U.S. officials argued that these reactors produced a smaller quantity of weapons-suitable by-products that those at the Yongbyon complex.

Annual shipments of 500,000 tons of heavy oil were guaranteed to enable north Korea to offset lost power generation capacity.

Food shipments to help it respond to natural disasters were also promised.

In an article reviewing the lack of progress in constructing the reactors, the January 30 Wall Street Journal noted that Pyongyang also understood that the World Bank and Asian Development Bank would help finance the modification and upgrade of its nationwide electrical grids to make them compatible with the new reactors.

However, stated the Journal, "U.S. officials last week gave their most explicit signal that the agreement underpinning the $4.6 billion nuclear-power project has been irreparably damaged." So far, it continued, the project "mostly has consisted of taking down a mountain and digging the huge hole where the nuclear plant will reside."  
 
North-south talks
Meanwhile, talks between the governments of north and south Korea were held at the end of January. The two sides agreed to complete rail links between north and south, and to open roads on the west side of the peninsula.

A south Korean government official said the south would not object to referring the crisis to the UN Security Council--a proposal put forward by the Bush administration--but "will not support the idea of sanctions on North Korea and will continue to ask the United States, Japan, and other countries to extend their efforts through dialogue."

Among the factors behind Seoul taking some distance from Washington’s actions and threats has been the large-scale and widespread protests in south Korea at the end of last year. Sparked by the acquittal of two soldiers who were court-martialed after their mine-clearing vehicle ran over and killed two south Korean girls, the demonstrations revealed the widespread opposition to the presence of U.S. troops. Protesters have explained that they consider the U.S. government a greater threat of war than the workers state in the north.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home