09.12.2004 The Korea Herald
Seoul, Washington officials doubt Pyongyang conducted nuclear test
(cont'd)
If North Korea successfully tested a weapon, the reclusive country would become the eighth nation to have proven nuclear capability - Israel is also assumed to have working weapons - and it would represent the failure of 14 years of efforts to stop the North's nuclear program.
Government officials throughout Asia and members of Bush's national security team have also feared it could change the nuclear politics of Asia, fueling political pressure in South Korea and Japan to develop a nuclear deterrent independent of the United States.
Both countries have the technological skill and the raw material to produce a bomb, though both have insisted they would never do so. South Korea has admitted in the past couple of weeks that it conducted experiments that outside experts fear could produce bomb-grade fuel, first in 1982 and then in 2000.
North Korea said over the weekend that the South's nuclear experiments in 1982 and 2000 involving plutonium and uranium made the communist state more determined to pursue its own nuclear programs.
The South Korean experiments were likely to further complicate the stalled six-nation talks aimed at dismantling the North's nuclear development. South Korea has said the experiments were purely for research and it had no intentions to try to build nuclear weapons.
The Times report noted that North Korea has declared several times in the past year that it might move to demonstrate its nuclear power.
Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry has already accused Bush of an "almost myopic" focus on Iraq that has distracted the United States while North Korea, by some intelligence estimates, has increased its arsenal from what the American Central Intelligence Agency suspects was one or two weapons to six or eight now.
Bush, while declaring he would not "tolerate" a nuclear North Korea, has insisted that his approach of involving China, Russia, Japan and South Korea in a new round of talks with the North is the only reasonable way to force the country to disarm. He has refused to set the kind of deadline for disarmament that he set for Saddam Hussein.
When asked in an interview with The New York Times two weeks ago to define what he meant by "tolerate," he said: "I don't think you give timelines to dictators and tyrants. I think it's important for us to continue to lead coalitions that are firm and strong, in sending messages to both the North Koreans and the Iranians."
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By Choi Soung-ah and wire services |
